Critical Intent as a Form of Life
The School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study will host a three-day conference honoring the scholarship of Professor Didier Fassin from April 18-20, 2026. This international gathering brings 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 will feature 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 will explore 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. On Sunday afternoon, Fassin will participate in an extended public conversation reflecting on his intellectual journey. His lecture, "Ultima Verba," will follow on Monday morning. Speakers for this event will include Derek Bermel, João Biehl, Veena Das, Bernard Harcourt, Axel Honneth, Razia Iqbal, Rosalind Morris, Natasha Raheja, Mara Viveros Vigoya, and Bruce Western.
This celebration of Fassin's extraordinary career offers 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.