Immigration

After the death of several dozens of refugees, most of them fleeing Afghanistan, in a shipwreck off the coasts of Calabria, in the South of Italy, on the 26th of February 2023, Lorenzo Alunni, current Member in the School of Social Science, and Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor, wrote a column for Le Monde, analyzing how Europe had shifted from a politics of rescue to a criminalization of humanitarianism.

In Por una repolitización del mundo. Las vidas descartables como desafío del siglo xxi (Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2018), Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, examines who today has the right to a decent...

The History Working Group is a Member-led initiative that mobilized in early 2017 in response to President Trump’s executive orders banning travel and immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The group produced a series of articles for...

In recent months, the Institute for Advanced Study has issued public statements in response to the original and revised executive orders that restrict travel from predominantly Muslim countries. The orders, currently suspended, cause us great concern...

The Institute for Advanced Study came into being at the most inauspicious of times. Founded in the early years of the Great Depression, it took shape during the buildup to the Second World War and under the growing shadow of authoritarian regimes. Its first Director Abraham Flexner published his manifesto on the “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” in October 1939, barely a month after the outbreak of hostilities in Europe. Surely this was a daunting moment to defend “the fearless and irresponsible thinker” and advocate for the free expression of knowledge and curiosity. 

In November 1954, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to a magazine in which he declared that, were he a young man again, he would not try to become a scientist: “I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of...

To Albert Einstein, she was “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.” More straightforward in his praise, Einstein’s fellow Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Hermann...

In recent years, the trafficking of women and children into the sex sector has become the focus of a steady spate of media coverage, the subject of abundant policy interventions, and the target of local, national, and transnational activist campaigns...

Philosophers have always been interested in moral questions, but social scientists have generally been more reluctant to discuss morals and moralities. This is indeed a paradox since the questioning of the moral dimension of human life and social...

­­The security of a nation and the safety of its population versus the protection of constitutional liberties and human rights is a quandary that arose in the aftermath of 9/11, but it is not novel to the twenty-first century. Discrimination between...