Didier Fassin

Didier Fassin is an anthropologist and a sociologist who has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France. Trained as a physician in internal medicine and public health, he dedicated his early research to medical anthropology, focusing on the AIDS epidemic and health inequalities. He later developed the field of critical moral anthropology, which explores the historical, social, and political signification of moral forms involved in everyday judgment and action as well as in the making of national policies and international relations. He has also carried out an ethnography of the state, through a study of urban policing and the prison system. His recent work is on the theory of punishment, the politics of life, and the public presence of the social sciences, was presented for the Tanner Lectures, the Adorno Lectures, and at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, respectively. Recipient of the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award, he is currently involved in a global program on crises, examining in particular the cases of migrants and refugees as well as the international response to the situation in the Middle East. A member of the American Philosophical Society, he was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal, the highest distinction of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He has been elected at the Collège de France on the Chair Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies, themes on which he delivers ten lectures every year. he explores contemporary stakes in public health, with special reference to the coronavirus pandemic. He occasionally contributes to newspapers such as Le Monde and The Guardian and magazines such as theLondon Review of Books and The Atlantic. His recent books have been translated in twelve languages. They include Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (2011), Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (2013), At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions(2015), Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (2016), The Will to Punish (2018), Life: A Critical User's Manual (2018), and Death of a Traveller. A Counter Investigation (2021), The Worlds of Public Health (2023), Moral Abdication. How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza (2025) and Exile. Chronicle of the Border, with Anne-Claire Defossez (2025)