Local Initiatives and exclusion of foreign residents. A France-Japan Comparison – ILERE

This project deals with the initiatives taken by citizens, associations and local authorities to maintain and to renew social links with a special focus on foreign residents and residents of foreign origin.
The feature of our methodology lies in the crossbreeding between three research fields often considered in a dissociated manner. The first field is the research on social health and social health indicators; the second one is the theoretical works dealing with the ethic of care, considered as an approach of social reality in terms of interdependences and of relations; finally, we will consider the field of public policies against exclusion and marginalization of foreign residents and residents of foreign origin. In the three cases, the local level is the relevant place, even though not the only one, for initiatives and experimentations.
We have a triple purpose. Firstly, we aim at examining how the social indicators and the care paradigms unable us to take into account the risk of exclusion of foreign residents and residents of foreign origin, and how it could contribute to ensure their participation to the definition of the local « good-living ». Our second objective is to identify the new relations between citizenship, nationality and locality, as well as the corresponding emerging rights, being civic, social or political. Finally we aim at putting into perspective the contributions, as well as the limits, of a participative and deliberative democracy, to the « good-living » of foreign residents.