We are pleased to announce that Isabelle Bruno defends her habilitation to direct research (HDR) on Monday 2 December 2024 (2pm) at ENS Paris-Saclay.
‘This is the culmination of a long process, of which the year's residency at IEA Nantes was a decisive step, thanks to the valuable encounters it made possible.’ I. Bruno
The fence and the standard.
Surveying the lines of power as a sociologist of appropriation and quantification.
The application for this habilitation to direct research is made of two volumes.
In addition to a selection of publications issued between 2008 and 2024, the first volume (407 p.) includes a synthesis of the trajectory followed since the thesis defence, the contributions of the research carried out as well as the work in progress and the prospects it opens up. Together, they trace a research itinerary that has taken from the offices of Saint-Gobain in La Défense to those of the California State Coastal Conservancy in Oakland, from the directorates-general of the European Commission to the Xerox warehouses lost in upstate New York, from the statistical services of the French ministries to the beach establishments in Pampelonne Bay. In each of these areas, the survey examined the social relations of power and resistance, their materiality and their productivity. From the power to classify to the power to exclude, from ‘statactivism’ to conflicts of ownership, from the standard that creates discrepancies to the fence that keeps people apart, it examined how practices of quantification and processes of appropriation contribute to producing social inequalities and the drivers of their contestation.
The second volume (545 p.) is an unpublished manuscript entitled Quand la mer monte, à qui appartiennent les plages? L'affaire Martin's Beach : enquête socio-historique sur le pouvoir d'appropriation des rivages et les résistances de l'indisponible (1838-2024). This monograph dissects a case of private appropriation of a Californian beach, taking into account the ‘dual nature’ of this space, inseparably a living environment and a social invention, a desirable commodity and a vulnerable biotope. Using archives and legal documents, interviews and observations, a press corpus and a questionnaire, she examines over the long term how and by whom the shores have been constituted as appropriable resources, torn between collective availability, economic valorisation and ecological preservation. At a time when the physical scarcity of sandy beaches is exacerbating social competition to occupy, consume and even exclusively own them, the hypothesis of a global enclosure movement is explored here on the basis of a local conflict configuration. The case studied provides a contextual analysis of the unequal distribution, structured by the property-owning order, of opportunities to use the coastline and their viability. The story does not end there. From encroachment to abandonment, it extends the movement of dispossession through the question of what is inappropriable, and shifts the focus from inequalities of access to the socially differentiated conditions of a still tentative withdrawal from the coast.
Know more about our Fellow
Members of the jury:
DELDRÈVE Valérie, Directrice de recherche, INRAE (rapportrice)
HIBOU Béatrice, Directrice de recherche, CNRS (rapportrice)
LAVAL Christian, Professeur émérite, Université Paris Nanterre (rapporteur)
LAFERTÉ Gilles, Directeur de recherche, INRAE (examinateur)
NEWFIELD Christopher, Directeur de recherche, ISRF ; Distinguished Professor Emeritus, UCSB (examinateur)
LEBARON Frédéric, Professeur, ENS Paris-Saclay (garant)
