Discrimination considered as a social experience and a practical political philosophy – DISCRI

The present conception of social justice is progressively concentrating on fighting discriminations. One questions less the inequalities between social positions than the access of a number of individuals and groups to all kinds of social positions. In this picture, the inequalities considered most scandalous are those resulting from discriminations against foreigners, migrants, disabled persons or women, as they cannot equally compete for access to certain goods, particularly education, employment, housing, media, politics…, being more or less brutally and explicitly discriminated. A great number of measures, laws, charts of good conduct and institutions, including the HALDE, aim at fighting these discriminations. Support to this model of justice and to the representations of social life it mobilizes is so strong that, very often, we just limit ourselves to measuring discriminations and denouncing them.

Our research project does not aim at measuring discriminations or at analysing the effects of political actions intending to reduce them. Our goal is first of all to analyse the social experience of discriminated persons in order to find out how they cope and explain the discriminations suffered, how they perceive them as injustices, why they rebel, give up or adapt. In this way, we want to seize discriminations as social experiences and as implementations of a “spontaneous” practical political philosophy defining situations and conducts as being more or less just. In order to understand experiences discriminated persons go through, we have to also study the experiences of actors who more or less voluntarily inflict these discriminations. Ultimately, we will try to define the normative syntax of actors of discriminations on both sides.

The duration of this research project is 30 months. It will concern women and “visible minorities” in four areas: education, work, media and politics. In each field, in Paris and the provinces, we intend to make about thirty personal interviews and to organize a sociological intervention, i.e. several sessions of debate between discriminated and discriminating persons. In the end, this research will be based on observations, approximately 120 personal interviews and 4 sociological interventions during which persons in charge and militants of the fields will be heard. We thus wish to understand the experiences, reasons and arguments of actors directly concerned with discriminations. We make the hypothesis that there may be a certain distance between the philosophies and politics leading the denunciation and fight against discriminations, and the practical experiences and political philosophies of actors directly concerned by them.

This research will be conducted within the CADIS in Bordeaux (UMR EHESS/Bordeaux 2). The team of researchers is composed of François Dubet (Pr.), project manager, Olivier Cousin (Pr.), Eric Macé (Pr.) and Sandrine Rui (Mcf), all of them teaching staff of the University of Bordeaux 2. These researchers have already conducted and published results of researches on feelings of injustice, education, work, media and politics. The results of this project will be published as a book and several articles and conference papers in France and abroad.

This project is based on no particular institutional construction. It aims at allowing researchers to work in areas they know well, at developing and renewing already old interrogations on inequalities, recognition of singularities and social justice, in fields and situations in which they are experts.