Comment exercer le métier de sociologue dans une société caractérisée par une forte circulation des savoirs ? Le cas des dispositifs ministériels français d’incitation à l’engagement

En raison de la grande circulation des savoirs qui caractérise les sociétés contemporaines, l’exercice du métier de sociologue demande à celles et ceux qui le pratiquent une grande vigilance sur le sens et la portée de leurs affirmations, d’une part, et sur la mise au point de procédures garantissant le maintien de leur posture critique d’autre part. L’analyse des participations juvéniles en France révèle toutes les difficultés relatives à cet enchevêtrement des discours tenus par le personnel politique, l’administration et les acteurs sociaux si bien que l’on retrouve les mêmes notions d’autonomie, projet, engagement et responsabilité dans tous les ordres discursifs considérés. À partir d’une enquête en cours d’exploitation, cet article proposera une approche obviant à ces coïncidences lexicales.Contemporary societies are characterized by a huge circulation of all kind of knowledges. This core issue includes two major effects on the craft of sociology : on the one hand, sociologists need a great awareness about the meanings and the social impacts of their assessments, on the other hand they must plan proceedings that may authorize the maintenance of their critical posture. The analysis of youth social participation in France exemplifies the difficulties with embedded discourses shaped by policy makers, Public Administration and social actors : we find out the same notions of autonomy, project, commitment and responsibility in the three considered instances. Based on an in progress research, this paper will propose an approach that would obviate these lexical coincidences

Les recherches sociologiques sur la jeunesse en France et leurs liens avec les préoccupations politico-administratives

Cet article propose l'historique de la façon dont la sociologie française a trouvé -dans l'actualité des inquiétudes manifestées par l'administration publique à l'egard de la jeneusse- une incitation à appréhender certains thèmes, à privilégier l'etude de certaines tranches d'âge. Nous ne supposerons pas nécessairement l'existence d'un lien de causalité entre les débat politique, les demandes de l'administration et le contenu spécifique des recherches sociologiques, puisque cette position conduirait à négliger l'autonomie relative de la production. A un moment donné, le discours politique et les recherches scientifiques convergent sur l'intérêret et l'urgence de traiter certaines thèmes et de se pencher sur certaines populations. En partant d'objectifs pourtant différents, décision versus connaissance, les deux discours ont pour effet de créer des catégories: les jeunes, les jeunes adultes et, finalement, les adolescents deviennent tour à tour les protagonistes de l'actualité en fonction des impeératifs liés auz questions sociales, des dangers présumés auxquels ils s'exposent eux-mêmes ou qu'ils représentent pour la société.The present paper makes a historical account of the way French Sociology has responded to current concerns of public services about youth in the course of years; such concerns never failed to trigger studies on specific topics, highlighting various ages of life. However this does not necessarily entail a connection between political debates, the requests of public services and the specific content of sociological researches -such a standpoint would cast doubt on the relative autonomy of scientific production. It merely indicates that, at a given time, political discourse and scientific research shared a common interest in some particular groups of individuals and thought it a matter of urgency to deal with specific topics concerning these groups. Although the political and the scientific discourses were motivated by different drives (a decision-making capacity vs a quest for knowledge), they both came to identify and define some age-group categories. Thus the young, the young adults and more recently the adolescents have progressively turned out to be the protagonists of the news whether they are viewed as society's threatened victims or as its threatening victimizers

Individual and Social Temporalities in American Sociology (1940–2000)

This article is based on the analysis of 259 titles of articles selected from four American sociological journals (the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, the American Sociological Review and Social Problems), over a period of 60 years (1940–2000). These titles contain key words such as age(s), generation(s), life cycle and life course, as well as a group of words that identify the purpose of each specific article. The lexical analysis of the data gathered in this way allows us to observe how various orientations, themes and objects of research are encoded in the titles. Comparing how each of these terms is used shows the way in which sociological reasoning has integrated different perspectives on individual and social temporalities. We have established that each of the four different perspectives considered refers to an exclusive lexical repertoire, to themes of differentiated research that belong to a specific historical period

January 2002 - Staff Meeting Minutes

LES NOUVELLES FORMES D’ENGAGEMENT EN FRANCE. DISPOSITIFS INSTITUTIONNELS ET PARTICIPATIONS JUVÉNILES (VINCENZO CICCHELLI) Ce qu’il y a d’inédit dans l’engagement contemporain Pour comprendre la signification de l’essor récent en France de nouvelles formes d’engagement des adolescents et des jeunes, il est nécessaire d’avoir à l’esprit les deux éléments qui les caractérisent. D’une part, des responsables gouvernementaux, des élus locaux, des agents administratifs, des responsables associatifs ..

La jeunesse française : paradoxes et polarisations

This paper aims at portraying an overall picture of young people’s condition in France. In an attempt to provide an overview of the social changes that are occurring in their lives, it endeavours to highlight the main features of contemporary youth. First, this paper draws on the perspective of the regimes of youth transitions in Europe (Walther 2006), in order to illustrate the specificity of the French case. It then takes a distinctive position in the analysis of the recent important shifts by exploring the paradoxes that shape the lived experiences of young French people, especially the dialectic between their autonomy and dependency. Finally, the increasing divergence of the paths to adulthood between educated and uneducated young people is explored, using the two relevant examples of the transition from school to work and the process of leaving parental home

Fictionnalisation des attentats et théorie du complot chez les adolescents

S’il est admis que la production culturelle a accoutumé les adolescents à endosser une posture interprétative, peu d’enquêtes s’attachent à en montrer les contours et à explorer le lien entre cette dernière et une propension à adhérer aux théories du complot. Nous considérons ici les adolescents comme des narratologues ordinaires et tentons de décrire les mécanismes de fictionnalisa¬tion par lesquels ces derniers retrouvent dans le réel et dans les médias-cultures des schèmes interprétatifs communs.Number of research have shown how cultural prod¬ucts require from teenagers to assume an interpre¬tative stance, but researches seldom highlight the contours of this interpretative work, and its links with conspiracy theories. In this article, we consider teenagers as ordinary narratologists, and try to ana¬lyze the fictionalisation mechanisms, through which young people find common interpretative schemes in real life and media-cultures

O gosto pelo mundo: a globalização da cultura apreendida pelo cosmopolitismo estético-cultural dos jovens na França

Alguns produtos culturais globais contribuem para a construção de uma representação de um mundo, por vezes, plural - em virtude da diversidade de produtos que circulam internacionalmente - e unificado por certas referências culturais. Oriundas de composições geracionais multiculturais, e sensíveis às injunções de mobilidade (turística, estudantil e/ou profissional), os jovens são atores ativos neste processo de globalização dos produtos culturais. Neste artigo nos interrogaremos sobre os papéis do consumo e dos imaginários culturais na emergência de uma relação cosmopolita com o mundo. Aqui, o conceito de cosmopolitismo estético-cultural é mobilizado para analisar, além dos fenômenos de internacionalização dos repertórios de consumo, as mutações provenientes dos consumos culturais, que têm um impacto na apreensão da alteridade etno-nacional. Assim, distinguimos cinco configurações para o cosmopolitismo estético-cultural entre os jovens. Este último, portanto, constitui um continuum antes de ser um tipo-ideal, que serviria de padrão para mensurar o cosmopolitismo: em graus, combinações, ordenações diversas, formas “impuras” observadas, alimentadas tanto pelas experiências estéticas e culturais, quanto pelas relações simbólicas com o mundo, seus objetos e representações.

The Looming Shadows of the Walls. Is a Cosmopolitan Europe still Possible?

In a Europe of many lights and shadows, cosmopolitan sociology provides a valid theoretical framework to distinguish one from the other. If cosmopolitan sociology is an attempt to understand how individuals, social groups and institutions deal with the challenges of ever more transnational social processes, then the European issue can be fully inserted within such an approach. From this point of view, following the austerity policies and recent events involving Syrian refugees and the attack by Daesh activists at the heart of Europe, sociology has started to enquire whether a cosmopolitan Europe is still possible. Conversaly, in the history of Europe and in its Constitutional Treaties, traces of cosmopolitanism are to be found almost everywhere. In this context, our study examines the crisis pervading Europe today and highlights the standing back to a certain extent of cosmopolitan sociology. At the same time, it stresses the hope that a change of direction will occur and the opportunity grasped of reflecting more deeply on the founding principles of cosmopolitan Europe

Conclusion. Des identités meurtrières aux identités plurielles. Quand autrui devient une composante de soi

Cicchelli Vincenzo. Conclusion. Des identités meurtrières aux identités plurielles. Quand autrui devient une composante de soi. In: Adolescences méditerranéennes. L'espace public à petits pas. Paris : L'Harmattan, 2007. pp. 409-445. (Débats Jeunesses, 20