Drawing on Michel Foucault, many contemporary sociological works criticize social institutions by focusing on the ways in which those institutions control, limit and discipline bodies. Fewer pieces – with notable exceptions – have concentrated on the disciplinarization of minds. By scrutinizing the social production and framing of feelings and emotions, ETHOPOL will analyze institutional work as a specific pedagogy that transforms not only our identities and behaviors, but also our feelings and judgments. Members of ETHOPOL will focus on policies that aim at transforming subjectivity, in order to detect practical forms of power and government that are deployed onto and into their subjects’ “inwardness”. Hence, rather than focusing on biopolitics (which directs the lives of people), we will focus on actions that regulate feelings and redefine ethical relations to the self and to the world, a relation we define as “ethopolitics”. Unlike many contemporary approaches, ETHOPOL does not aim to describe the affective dimension of actions; we rather intend to analyze how affectivity becomes the main – if not exclusive – object of regulation policies. In fact, ethopolitics seems to encompass specific forms of social intervention, which endeavor to transform how people think (including about themselves), how they formulate moral values and judgments, and how they feel. Members of ETHOPOL have decided to focus on family intimacy to observe these dynamics – and more specifically on institutions that produce, correct, authorize, and/or impede family ties. These institutions have been carefully selected for being complementary to one another. Either belonging to public, associative or business sectors, they intervene in various fields: social work, health care, moral expertise, etc. Five different objects have been selected as sites in which to observe these processes of ethical alteration: international adoption, gestational surrogacy, paternity testing, postnatal depression, and IVF refusal. These objects share a similar but paradoxical dynamic. All five include institutions which aim to intervene in order to support, help, or appease. However, these interventions can be perceived as a means of transforming their participants’ relations to the self and to others, and which – by “working on” their affectivity – compels individuals to concur with the process to which they have been subjected. Thus, for example, adults who are engaged by Adoption Bureaus experience a transformation of their parental desires; parents by gestational surrogacy are confronted to moral and ethical dilemmas that surround the relationship between their child and his/her biological mother; individuals who resort to paternity testing question their paternal love; women suffering from postnatal depression are cured from their so-called inability to “mother”; and, finally, people who are denied IVF have to cope with a refusal based upon an expertise which judges them inapt to parenthood. Due to the fact they are “taken in charge”, all these people experience – in different ways – an evolution of their own judgments, wills, desires, and also their convictions, opinions and ways of being. As such, they experience a policy that “directs” them by arousing their voluntary adhesion to a process that limits and frames their desires and affects (rather than undergoing a mere discipline that would “correct” them by imposing new forms of action and/or behavior). Newly convinced subjects, they are now expected to feel how purposeful and well-founded enacted norms are. This project is part of a broader theoretical perspective, which aims at unifying the critique of framing processes with the comprehensive analysis of their effects, by focusing on “inwardness”. As such, ETHOPOL will help to understand sensitive marks of the government of self, and to develop a new reflection on these “ethopolicital” subjective transformation policies.