Lecture by Michel Kokoreff “Precarity, Racism and Revolt”

Friday, 23 September 2016, 19:00

Recent social movements in France have once again revealed the following: in today’s French society precarity is as much at issue, as the matters of labor. It touches millions of workers, regardless of their membership in trade unions, as well as pupils, students, and, most of all, the unemployed. What we call “institutionalization of precarity” does exist. This means that exclusion and marginalization are not the only threats to social integrity. There is also the so called “destabilization of the sustainable,” that threatens those parts of the society, based on the values of social cohesion, solidarity, and redistribution. Such social vulnerability contributes to the growth of violence. It manifests itself, at work in particular, as moral or sexual harassment, racism, anti-Semitism, discrimination, and islamophobia. At this double frontline – social and ethno-racial – current protests find their basis.

The lecture is the first of the course “City – Discrimination, Segregation, Integration – French Experience”, developed by the French Institute in Ukraine, exploring these issues from historical, sociological, and demographic perspectives.

Michel Kokoreff (b. 1959) is a professor of sociology at Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint- Denis University, deputy director of the Center for Sociological and Political Research in Paris (CRESPPA). Since 20 years he has been working on the issues of social and political transformations of poor suburban French neighborhoods. He is the author of the books “Les mondes de la drogue” (Odile Jacob, 2000, in collaboration with Dominique Duprez), “La force des quartiers. De la délinquance à l’engagement politique” (Payot, 2003), “Sociologie des émeutes” (Payot, 2008), and “Refaire la cité. L’avenir des banlieues” (La République/Seuil, 2013, in collaboration with Didier Lapeyronnie).

In 2015 the course Migrations, Identities, Territories, developed by the French Institute, took place in Visual Culture Research Center as part of the “School of the Displaced” of The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015.

Working language: French with consecutive translation into Ukrainian.

Free entrance.

Organized by The French Institute in Ukraine

Supported by ERSTE Stiftung та Charles Stewart Mott Foundation