Social sciences of work and politics have poorly documented the relationship between health and political activity. However, research focusing on elected representatives suggests that there is a need to study this subject. On the one hand, the literature emphasises the intensity of political work, on the other hand, it reminds us that dedication is a central component of the political ethos. This tension, which is structurally inscribed in political activity, invites us to consider the health of elected representatives as an object of research. To do so, we hypothesise that tensions between, on the one hand, multiple forms of testing and wear and tear resulting of the requirements of the function, which can potentially degrade health, and, on the other hand, injunctions to dedication and norms of conduct requiring good health, affect the exercise of political mandate(s). The ELUSAN project, which focuses on professional elected officials (national and local), will contribute to enriching and renewing knowledge of the political profession, by combining contributions from the sociology of work and political science. The objective is to answer four linked questions: What are the salient features of the working conditions of elected representatives? How do tacit professional norms on health circulate in the political field? How has the institutional protection of elected officials' health been differentiated and unequal? How is health inscribed in work experiences and political careers? Finally, the ELUSAN project seeks to make a double break. A break with ordinary but also indigenous discourses that tend to deny any physical or psychological weaknesses to elected representatives and a break with academic approaches to politics that do not consider health as a significant component of political activities.

The themes of the “disappearance” of “the Working Class”, the generalization of a middle class and “the end of social class” in European and North-American societies were widely diffused during the 1980’s and 1990’s. But we have witnessed since a “return of social class”. Notably, we see a regained interest in “le populaire”, that is in the working class condition and experience. This recent attention arises from the visible destitution of populations at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but also from renewed discourses on “the people” as a major political question. The socio-economic data available reveals presently rising social inequality between working class categories and middle and upper class categories. Still, these statistics shed no light on the concrete living conditions and experiences, nor the social and cultural recompositions of the working classes. In fact, we do not always know how to name these groups whose way of life, cultural practices, and representations have profoundly evolved. Our project intends to respond to the challenging tasks of grasping “le populaire”. We believe that the working class condition cannot be apprehended solely by looking at its margins or by fragmenting it in a variety of objects of study (politics, family, culture, work, education, etc.). Our approach proves hence to be original in a twofold manner. First, it focuses on a segment of the working classes that has been understudied in France, Europe and the United States. We designate this segment as “the working classes of the middle.” Certainly a loose term, but purposefully chosen for this reason: the research will eventually render it more precise. Frequently, only the “lower” and “upper” segments are distinguished by the scholarship on the working classes: the “lower” being composed of groups lacking economic resources, access to social protections and cultural capital; and the “upper” designating those who by their employment stability, general well being and participation in selective social practices, are often close to the middle class. While this distinction highlights established hierarchies within this social group, it also conceals an essential “middle” where a crossroads for internal mobility actively operates. By focusing on “the working classes of the middle” we take on as object of study particular working class groups, which have paradoxically been left aside by sociology and, moreover, have been analyzed in political science largely as a “repressive” group on the verge of turning to the extreme right. The originality of this project lies also in its methodological approach. It emphasizes a procedure that articulates fieldwork and ethnography with rigorous statistical work throughout the research process. While our fieldwork will focus on cultural recompositions of working class worlds (leisure activities, norms dictating the formation of couples or the education of children, of relationships to local space, to migrations, etc.) and will collectively produce 50 household monographs, we will also revise and reprocess censuses and surveys (on employment, cultural practices, among others) from the INSEE (the National Institute for Statistics of France). Further, the project will stress the necessary combination of national and regional data in order to take into account important territorial disparities. This research program - which gathers 26 researchers specializing on the working class and coming from a variety of research traditions, perspectives and generations - will therefore go beyond the usual monographic approach so often used to study underprivileged groups by analyzing “the working classes of the middle” in a comprehensive manner: be they urban or rural, “feminine” or “masculine”, at the workplace and outside, or in their struggle to make a respectable place for themselves in the present world of precarious employment.

A team of about fifteen researchers – specialized in Law, Sociology, Psychology, and Political Science – will conduct a multidisciplinary research, on both a theoretical and empirical basis, pertaining to the forms, the mechanisms, the evolutions and the stakes of the articulation of justice and health to cope with criminals. Our empirical research, led on a quantitative and qualitative basis, aims at objectivizing and comparing the practices in six French courts. This research will be based on interviews of various professionals and on the statistical analysis of at least 3 000 cases, which will be selected over a long period in order to indentify possible changes. As French Criminal Law contains penalties including different compulsory or quasi compulsory treatment, this study aims at highlighting the features of the offender populations sentenced to this very kind of penalty. The study will also question the way treating penalties may affect the practices of criminal justice as well as offenders’ careers. REPESO gathers together researchers from five laboratories well-known in the field of criminal law, criminology (DCS, EPRED, CRDP), political science and sociology (ESO, CENS).

Beyond the many victims of the pandemic, all citizens may have been affected in their daily lives, and are likely to be affected in the long term, by the economic and social consequences of the Covid-19 health crisis. Everyone has been confined (except for some particular professions), but certainly not in the same way: containment has revealed not only inequalities in relation to illness and social ties, but also in relation to housing and work. Similarly, the denial of liberty (and in particular freedom of movement and assembly) during confinement did not apply to everyone in the same way. Did it only update the social inequalities that already existed under normal circumstances? Did it exacerbate them? Did it introduce new ones? In terms of social relations, which ones have become stronger, weaker or worse? How did French people stand loneliness or, on the contrary, cohabitation in confinement? Research on social networks has shown that personal relationships are crucial resources, just as material resources, and that they function as a “social capital” that can be mobilized throughout the life course. What impact in the short, medium and longer term will the Covid-19 crisis have on our personal networks, on our relationships with our relatives, friends, neighbors and colleagues? To answer these questions, there is a major challenge in developing large-scale research that will make it possible to precisely measure the effects, over time, of this crisis on the living and working conditions of the French, on the ways in which they live and move around, and on the forms of sociability and solidarity that are at the basis of social cohesion. With this in mind, the VICO project aims to conduct a broad longitudinal survey. The distinctive feature of this survey: it is based on a large sample of the ordinary population having experienced confinement in France in the spring of 2020; it will consist in several successive waves during which the members of the panel will be interviewed three times over a period of 15 months in total; and it will combine quantitative and qualitative approaches. In the urgency to collect solid scientific data during the event, but also with the opportunity to understand what is changing in our social life in times of crisis, a first group of researchers in sociology and social sciences has already teamed up to design, carry out and disseminate the first wave of this original longitudinal survey. The survey, based on an online questionnaire distributed during containment, received more than 16,000 responses. The objective of the VICO project is thus to add: 1. an additional wave of interview surveys, which are essential to seize the subjective experiences, representations and transformations of the respondents' values; and 2. a second wave of questionnaire survey 12 months after the first, i.e. one year after the confinement, to measure the sustainability of the social dynamics observed during this exceptional crisis. The overall goal of the project is to analyse the social consequences of the health crisis over time, in order to determine whether the changes were just transitory, or eventually prove more persistent. The financial, material and human resources requested in this ANR project will sustain the analyses of the data from the first wave of the survey, and the implementation of the quantitative and qualitative surveys of the two following waves.

Observing a decline of interest in academic careers in medicine, both in France and internationally, this research focuses on the factors underlying career choices made by young physicians. We suspect that the decline in medical academia may be in part due to an insufficient recruitment of women that starts at the beginning of the training curriculum, and we hypothesize that the ideal mentoring/guidance/selection process of young female physicians may not be identical to the one ideal for young male physicians and that it is part of a complex and multifactorial set of individual and organizational factors. The aims of this project are to assess, with a mixed methodology (quantitative survey, interviews, archival analysis and observation), the respective contribution of different factors involved in career choices. Among these variables, some of which are already identified in the literature as predictive (mentoring and role models, perceived discrimination), others are identified but controversial (attitude toward research, work-life balance), and others are present in the area of counselling psychology, but have not yet been invoked to report on choosing a career in academic medicine (congruence of values between an organization-the academic community- and the individual, learning experiences, and several variables of personality: anxiety, stress, intrapreunarial self-capital). To provide a better understanding of the levers and barriers to engagement in academic careers in medicine, a first quantitative study is planned. This survey will be administered to the population of interns and fellows in France (N= 44,000) and will measure the variables invoked in the decision of a career choice in academic medicine and to articulate these variables within a global integrative model accounting for gender specific effect based on knowledge on the field of guidance psychology and educational sociology and inspired by Lent's theory. These quantitative analyses will be followed by a qualitative study from a retrospective point of view. Forty in-depth semi-structured interviews will be conducted with several women and men who have successfully completed an academic career in the field of medicine. These interviews will attempt to retrace their perceived career (trajectories) to identify critical periods during which they encounter difficulties or supports. Analysing the development of professional identity in regard with positive and negative experiences during the training course and after can provide a better understanding of individual dynamic over time and confirm our conclusions from study 1. The first two studies will provide elements on the influence of the proximal environment in individual decisions. However, beyond individual choices, we can also consider that the institution plays an active role in "designating" potential candidates for an academic career. The objective of the third study will be to analyse in a more specific way and by a mixed methodology (observation, archival analysis, interviews) the role of the institution in periods which could prove to be decisive during the curriculum: the choice to do or not a Master's degree and the process of becoming a fellow. Given serious consideration to the suggestion that individuals choose what they are chosen by, the aim is to highlight the institution’s role in framing personal and professional aspirations and producing a the range of possibilities. Beyond the contribution of new scientific knowledge on this issue, our consortium makes changing this situation, so that women have easier access to academic positions, central to its work. This is facilitated by the structure of our consortium, which brings together experts in the humanities and social sciences (psychology and sociology) and physicians who will be able to play the role of brokers of this knowledge to institutions (medical schools and national organizations) and residents in medicine.