Our research thematics are developed along two main streams:
Stream 1: Ages, life cycles and life courses
This approach is developed around 4 thematic lines. Childhood and adolescence (LT1), Ageing (LT2), Mobilities and Social ties (LT3), Articulating the professional sphere and the family sphere (LT4).
LT1: Childhood and adolescence
How do children and adolescents growing up in very diverse families (recomposed, homoparental, multi-ethnic, transnational…) construct their identity?
How can a psychotherapeutic intervention taking children and adolescents’ strengths, weaknesses, and resilience capacities into account be put in place?
How do public policies influence the family and social lives of young people, and how do the latter, in turn, fashion those policies?
LT2: Ageing
What are the consequences of the increase in life expectancy on family, conjugal and sexual relationships?
Do measures taken to care for ageing persons meet the needs and specific expectations of ever more diverse families?
What roles do grandparents play for their children and grandchildren?
How do inter-generational solidarities evolve over the life cycle?
How does the need to offer an elder assistance and invest in her/his care, affect arbitrations between the various spheres of personal, professional and family life?
What are the expectations of ageing persons of diverse (social, cultural and/or religious) origins with regard to family solidarity?
LT3: Mobilities and social ties
How do members of families living in distinct places continue to form a ‘family’ despite the geographical distance which separates them?
How are family decompositions/recompositions lived?
How are we to understand the conjugal, family and sexual mutations which accompany the explosion of new communication technologies?
Do intergenerational solidarities withstand the demands of professional, conjugal and spatial mobility?
LT4: Articulating the professional sphere and the family sphere
How has articulating work and family become an issue in society today?
What are the evolutions and transformations making it problematical?
What institutional answers have been offered? Their limits and adverse effects?
How do professional environments adapt to this problematic (or fail to)?
What interferences exist between professional life and family life and what are their impacts (e.g. on the professional career, parental or filial commitment, well-being and health…)?
How is articulating the two experienced and managed on an individual level?
What social inequalities does this articulation generate?
Stream 2: Family and sexual norms, morals and models
This approach is delineated around 5 thematic lines. The (re)composition of norms (LT5), The relationship between licit and transgressive practices (LT6), Social reactions to sexual violence (LT7), Interculturality (LT8).
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LT5: The (re)composition of norms
What are the conditions of emergence of a norm or a sexual or family ethic?
To what extent can several family models and/or sexual norms be superimposed, coexist, or compete with one another?
What are the institutionalization conditions of sexual and family norms?
Despised or celebrated, does the “sexual revolution” of the late 20th century represent a radical reformulation or a reconfiguration of ancient norms?
What is the impact of the recomposing of families on family, parental and conjugal norms?
What is the role of religion or, further, science in the appearance, survival and modification of family and sexual norms?
How do the opponents of dominant norms construct their discourse? What arguments do they rely on?
What forms do social debates and mobilizations in favour of alternative sexual and/or family models or norms assume?
What is the impact of the recomposition of norms (since that is indeed the title of the approach) on the various ways of making a link between the sexual, conjugal and familial?
LT6: The relationship between licit and transgressive practices
What are the methods for socially regulating licit and transgressive practices? How do these methods evolve in space and time?
How are licit practices gradually criminalized and vice versa?
What is the place of social movements in the criminalization or decriminalization of certain practices?
Is the transgression of a sexual norm always conscious and assumed?
What is the role of expertise in the construction and diagnosis of transgressive practices?
How much room is there for negotiation between licit and transgressive practices for the actors involved?
LT7: Social reactions to sexual violence
How are we to understand the wellsprings of social reaction in the faced with sexual violence? What evolutions have occurred over the course of Western history?
Where does rejection of the victims of sexual assaults come from? Where does denunciation of that rejection come from? How is the stigmatization of victims to be effectively combated?
LT8: Interculturality
In a globalized and increasingly intercultural world, what conceptions of sexuality, conjugality, the place of men and women in society - and that of care - clash, hybridize, superimpose themselves on one another, and replace one another, as much in the ‘North’ as in the ‘South’, in the ‘East’ as in the ‘West’?
What consequences does this sometimes violent encounter have on public policies on the one hand, and on family and individual practices on the other?
How do individuals and families who live at the crossroads of several cultural and/or religious communities manage this double normative baggage?