A New Administrative Framework for Mayotte, French Departement since 2011: Construction and Processing of Linguistic and Social Inequalities – INEMA

The purpose of the INEMA project is to investigate how the implementation of a "new" administrative framework in the former French Departmental Collectivity of Mayotte (it will become the 101st French Departement in 2011) could affect how social and linguistic inequalities are produced, regulated, transformed and perceived. With anthropologists, sociologists and sociolinguists working jointly on the project, it aims to adopt a pluridisciplinary approach of inequality to further develop recent insights from bottom-up sociological research on public policies as well as sociological analysis of intermeshing gender, ethnic, class and age relations. The project will benefit from sociolinguists and anthropologists'expertise on the island, on linguistic inequalities as well as on the local evolution of social division and hierarchies at work. Thus, INEMA principaly meets the requirements of the axis 4 of the call for project (individual, society, institution) and secondarily of the axis 1 (the question of inequalities).

The transformation of Mayotte into a French Departement represents a major political change and a unique context to study inequalities linked to class, gender, origin and age within postcolonial background and how they interact with specific inequalities linked to the new administrative status. This project aims at developping a multidimentional perspective on inequalities and promises decisive breakthrough in the analisis of the role institutions play in the construction and treatment of inequalities. It will also enhance knowledge on major issues this new departement will meet in the coming years.

The analisis of the devolution of public policies in this particular postcolonial context in order to understand inequalities will be threefold. Linguistic and education policies (Task 1) will be studied in order to understand inequalities in terms of linguistic and cultural capital, and how linguistic plurality is managed in this context. Social policies (Task 2) will enable us to examin the effects of public policies categorization in terms of class, gender and ethnic inequalities. The analisis of migratory policies from and to Mayotte (Task 3) will help us understand how migrations has become a political issue, as well as existing tensions between the inclusion of Mayotte' French nationals and the hightened marginalisation of Comorians on the island.