Critical Intent as a Form of Life
From April 18-20, 2026, the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study hosted, "Critical Intent as a Form of Life," a three-day conference honoring the scholarship of Professor Didier Fassin. This international gathering brought together leading scholars to engage with Fassin's transformative contributions to social science—from his groundbreaking work on moral anthropology to his critical, illuminating studies of policing, migration, and public health. Through rigorous ethnographic research conducted in prisons, hospitals, police departments, refugee camps, and humanitarian zones, Fassin has demonstrated how sustained attention to lived experience can illuminate the ethical contradictions embedded in institutions and policies. His influential frameworks—moral economies, humanitarian reason, the politics of life—have reshaped debates across anthropology, sociology, law, social theory, and politics.
The conference featured wide-ranging discussions on ethnographic methodology, the ethics of fieldwork in sites of violence and precarity, and the relationship between creative and scholarly practice. Over six panels, participants explored how Fassin's scholarship has reshaped our understanding of power, inequality, and ethical life, examining both the reach of his intellectual interventions across disciplines and the evolving challenges facing research and researchers in an era of mounting constraints on academic freedom. In addition, Fassin participated in an extended public conversation reflecting on his intellectual journey and delivered a public lecture, "Ultima Verba: Violence—A Critique."
This celebration of Fassin's extraordinary career offered an opportunity to consider the intellectual and public significance of social science: its capacity to reveal the moral dimensions of political life, to document realities that official accounts obscure, and to produce knowledge that deepens understanding of how institutions shape—and are experienced by—the people subject to them.
