François de Singly

The Speaker

François de Singly, professor of sociology at the Faculté des sciences humaines et sociales (School of Human and Social Sciences) and at the Sorbonne since 1990, is a specialist in the sociology of family, gender and education. 

He is well-known both in the scientific field and to the general public. He heads an important sociology laboratory, the Center for Research on Social Ties (Université Paris Descartes and the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research)), where he has assembled approximately fifty researchers (including Jean-Claude Kaufmann) and thirty doctoral students to inject new blood into research, particularly on interpretative sociology, in order to understand how each individual constructs his own world. He has developed a large number of quantitative and qualitative studies on the way men and women live and judge their mutual relationships.

François de Singly has held and now holds a number of collaborative positions (for example, Chairman of the CNRS “Sociology” Committee, currently responsible for the “Savoir et cultures” (Knowledge and Cultures) project with Axel Kahn, President of the Université Paris Descartes, member of the editorial board of the French-Québecois review Lien social et politiques (Social Bond and Policies), of the scientific committee of Sociologie du travail (Sociology of Work), etc.).

He manages several collections with the oldest French academic publisher, Armand Colin, including "Individu et société" ("Individual and Society") and "128 Sciences sociales" ("128 Social Sciences"), and, in addition to articles, has published about thirty works, including Fortune et infortune de la femme mariée (Fortune and Misfortune of the Married Woman) (PUF, Paris, 1987, Poche, 2003), Sociologie de la famille contemporaine (Sociology of the Contemporary Family); Le Soi, le couple et la famille (The Self, the Couple and the Family) (Nathan, Paris, 1996 and Poche, 2005), Libres ensemble (Free Together) (Nathan, Paris, 2000 and Poche, Paris, 2003), L’injustice ménagère (Menagerie Injustice) (A. Colin, Paris, 2007, Poche, 2008) and Comment aider l’enfant à devenir lui-même (How to Help the Child Become Himself) (A. Colin, 2009).

After first orienting his work along the lines of Pierre Bourdieu and of feminism, François de Singly is now developing his research as a sociology of the “second modernity” in Europe. He is analyzing the process of individualization and social construction of personal identity, as seen particularly in L’individualisme est un humanisme (Individualism is a Humanism) (Éditions de L’Aube, Poche 2007), Les uns avec les autres (Everyone Together) (A. Colin, Paris, 2003 and Poche, 2005), Les adonaissants (Between Children and Adolescents) (A. Colin, 2006, Poche 2007) and Les sociologies de l’individu (Sociologies of the Individual) (A. Colin, 2009).

Lectures

Wings and Roots, or the Transformation of Family Ties
Historically, the family has played a central role in the transmission of heritage and education. So it is not by mere chance that the genealogical tree is one of the main representations of the family. But modern times in the western world have progressively destabilized this vertical conception.

Families have also become a space where children gain their autonomy and adults maintain their personal identity.

How do we reconcile the “wings” of modernity with the “roots” of transmission? We propose an analysis of how contemporary individuals try to rise to this challenge by inventing new ways of living together. 

Bonds which hold but which do not attach us: towards a “liquid society”?
From the beginning of modernity, even progressive thinkers have been worried about the crisis of the social bond: would individuals be sufficiently “tied” to be happy with the fact that inherited bonds were broken or loosened? This is Durkheim’s line of questioning in Le Suicide, for example.

A century later, the question arose again with Robert Putnam in “Bowling Alone.” We will examine the thesis of the decline of social capital, examining particularly the reinvention of other forms of bonds which are less solid, more elective and more virtual.

This will also provide a chance to discuss Zygmunt Bauman’s theory on liquid society.

Love As Illusion and As Utopia
In private life, relationships between men and woman often take on an amorous dimension. Based on feminist theories, we can think of love as one of the means of making masculine domination acceptable, that is, by making men lovable.

In the history of the amorous imagination, love can be seen as one of the bases for the construction of personal identity, thanks to a specific type of recognition. Borrowing from films, novels, philosophy (Badiou) and sociology (Beck), we will look at the ambiguity of love and its effects on relationships between the sexes.

Book published in the United States
Modern Marriage and Its Cost to Women: A Sociological Look at Marriage in France, University of Delaware Press, 1996. 

Links

http://www.singly.org/francois/  
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x35ykw_francois-de-singly-le-point-de-vue http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x36pch_petite-enfance-francois-de-singly_politics
http://www.europe1.fr/Radio/Videos-podcast/Les-interviews-du-matin/Francois-de-Singly-et-Serge-Hefez
http://www.ina.fr/economie-et-societe/vie-sociale/video/MAN9740574195/la-famille.fr.html

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