A Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Aix-Marseille University (Faculty of Arts, Literature, Languages and Humanities), and a member of LEST since 2002, I will be visiting the Norbert Elias Centre (Aix-Marseille University, Avignon University, CNRS) from 1er September 2026.
My research has focused mainly on:
– Work and women workers in the healthcare sector
– Healthcare professions in the town
– Professions and the dynamics of their boundaries within the hospital
– The careers of working-class women in the healthcare sector
– The working classes and health standards
– The effects of shift work on the division of domestic labour
They draw on a variety of methods: ethnographic interviews, secondary analysis of quantitative data, direct observation and archival research, within the framework of ethnography understood as the combination of these different methods of data collection in the same field, investigated intensively with each source cross-checked by the others, and with questions enriched through a process of back-and-forth dialogue… To a lesser extent, I have worked on family monographs and drawn upon images and accounts of work.
– Building on my research into attitudes towards health standards amongst the working classes, which was carried out as part of the ANR Claspop (led by O. Masclet), I am currently investigating the internalisation of psychological culture, the ways in which it is embraced or distanced, and its effects. I am interested in the case of female care workers, who are particularly exposed to a patchwork of psychological knowledge and to individualising frameworks for understanding the world and the self, through their training – however brief – and their professional experiences.
– As part of the Quit-Ehpad project (IRESP-CNSA, led by J. Xing), I am helping to analyse the reasons for staff leaving and changing careers within residential care homes for the elderly.
– For my visiting fellowship at the CNRS, I propose a sociological approach to «white-coat» deviance, taking into account the entire process of deviance within the healthcare professions. Beyond the transgressions themselves, I am interested in the sanctions that are applied within institutions, within the professions, and even beyond them. I examine their effects in terms of career progression, both for individuals and for the professional group as a whole. One of the key aims of this research is to explore professional deviance as a means of analysing work and the professions.
