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In memoriam. Guy Rocher (1924-2025)

Yan Sénéchal and Marianne Kempeneers

In memoriam. Robert Sévigny, un scientifique bâtisseur infatigable de ponts, professeur émérite, département de sociologie, décédé le 13 mai 2025

Louis Maheu and Christopher McAll

Introduction du numéro : vide du social, vides dans le social

Denis Laforgue, David Mélo and Frédérique Giuliani

Le fragile au bord du vide à travers la culture populaire de masse : ouvrir l’imagination sociologique avec Spider-Man, The Sinner, The Bridge et Seven Seconds

Philippe Corcuff
This article follows paths of fragility, as a conceptual link (“notion-passage”) between fullness and emptiness. Four figures of fragility are explored in popular culture : the heroism of fragility in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, the melancholic fragilities in the series The Sinner, the “unfinished” character of Sonya Cross in the series The Bridge and the movement between precipice and renewal in the mini-series Seven Seconds. These works of popular culture are analyzed within a methodological framework inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “language games”. The aim is not to replace the theoretical-empirical core of sociology, but to help open up the “sociological imagination” (in the sense of Charles Wright Mills) to peripheral issues in which sociology takes little or too partial an interest.

L’expérience du « vide » : une sociologie des états existentiels

Marie-Chantal Doucet
This article proposes a sociology of existential states based on the experience of emptiness, understood as an experience of being disconnected from the world under late modernity. Based on research with young adults born in the 1990s, it considers how early socialization and the plurality of possibilities reconfigure contemporary existential conditions. Beyond a capacity to succeed in life according to standards of performance that have mostly been integrated individually, other issues have arisen around an expansion of what’s possible and the receding horizon of impossibility. Modernity’s promise of freedom, under which each individual can build a unique place in the world, is accompanied by a growing uncertainty around which paths to take. Existential indecision—whether to be here or elsewhere, to have kids or not, to live alone or in a couple, to prioritize love or friendship—feeds into a persistent feeling of inadequacy between an overflow of possibilities and a certain lack of resonance.

À l’intersection du veuvage et de la retraite : l’émergence du vide social à Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Yisso Fidèle Bacyé, George Rouamba and Moubassiré Sigué
This article analyzes the forms of loneliness experienced by people at the intersection of retirement and widowhood in the city of Ouagadougou. While these individuals previously enjoyed social capital in the form of family and colleagues, retirement and widowhood mark a disintegration of this capital as their social network dwindles. How do widowed people experience loneliness in the city of Ouagadougou ? The objective of this research is to understand the different forms of loneliness to which widowed people are exposed and the coping mechanisms they put in place. This research was carried out using qualitative methods, in the form of individual interviews and documentary research. The data was analyzed thematically. The results show that social isolation is expressed through three forms of loneliness : relational, emotional and structural. Collegial relationships don’t survive retirement. Intergenerational cohabitation, by exacerbating the economic vulnerability of households, is an opportunity to resist social isolation. Additionally, widows and widowers engage in a variety of leisure activities.

Murmures entre quatre murs : le retrait des personnes détenues, révélateur de la dégradation en prison

Corinne Rostaing
This article considers the experiences of detained persons who have withdrawn themselves and almost never leave their cells. On the one hand, it explores methodological questions of how to reach individuals hard-to-reach while, on the other hand, addressing more theoretical aspects around the heuristic interest of considering their experiences. An analysis of these meetings tells us a great deal about carceral experiences, especially about the process of degradation. These people experience total imprisonment, between the four walls of their cells, and accumulate forms of non-identity, non-participation and non-presence. More than anyone, they feel as though they “are nothing” and “have nothing left to lose.” An analysis of this nothing, and its social impacts, shows that “nothing” is never really nothing.

Des trous dans la socialisation : regards sur la vie collective des enfants en crèche

Pascale Garnier, Catherine Bouve and Carmen Sanchez
Considering “the emptiness” in the lives of children in daycare invites us to look at things from a new angle. It is not a question of ignoring “the fullness” of the expectations of collective life, but of tracking down what escapes it and what is revealed hiding in the background, especially in “particular details” that are a priori irrelevant (Piette, 1996). Whereas classical theories of socialization often remain attached to an “over-socialized” vision of social life (Wrong, 1961), through these “details” we seek to account for a plurality of modes of presence of young children that are woven between docility and resistance—significant of a singular existence. The observation of toddlers and the interpretation of what they do or don’t do raises essential methodological issues, where the gaze and intervention of daycare professionals are also at play in the situations.

Le plein et le vide comme balises tropiques

Roland Raymond
This article proposes to think sociologically about the consubstantiality of fullness and emptiness through a thematic study of the “energy transition,” which occurs as an ideal example. This article develops on the following idea : the political-technical-commercial logic that presides over development of the “energy transition” model, adopted and formalized by leading actors, sustains a simultaneous fullness and emptiness. On the one hand, it constructs and produces an intellectual and procedural fullness (first tropical beacon) and, concomitantly, a cognitive and actantial emptiness (second tropical beacon). This emptiness is particularly evident at the scale of “target audiences,” which are expected to mechanically transform into subjects of the energy transition. However, this won’t stop them from embodying, as more than simple “subjects” of the “energy transition,” reflections and creative energetic conduits. This is demonstrated through an analysis, on the one hand, of the logos, the rule of the imperative, the constitutive grammar of “ecological actions,” “ready-to-thinks” and “ready-to-acts” that participate from the social object that the “energy transition” has become and, on the other hand, of the nature of the situations, the prima of the oblative on the imperative, and especially the logics of investigation and the grammar of the situations from which ordinary actors are called to elaborate and embody a world in relationship with the question of energy that is altogether different from the one that has been envisaged and conceived.

Habiter entre le plein et le vide : esquisse d’une théorie de l’enchantement de l’ordinaire

Edgar Tasia
In this text, I interrogate the dialectical, sociological and existential relationship between an emptiness and fullness of the ordinary. In other words, what makes existence ordinary and what makes it such that this ordinariness is missing. To that end, I make use of a close reading of sociologist Emmanuel Belin’s work to outline a theory of ordinary enchantment. I show how the support of sociomaterial devices are necessary to maintaining the flow of the ordinary, without which life can become unlivable, emptied of its sense and order. To illustrate my argument, I draw on an ethnographic example from daily life, home organization, based on earlier research on Home Organizers, professionals who advise on storage and organization. Finally, I conclude with certain methodological notes to guide possible future ethnographic studies of ordinary enchantment.

Penser les formes sociales d’effacement au camp Spirit Lake : « Être hanté » comme mode d’appréhension du vide et méthode de production des savoirs sur le passé

Audrey Rousseau
This article begins with an explanation of Avery F. Gordon’s (2008) concept of “haunting,” which seeks to make the traces of social violence visible by questioning history’s silences and forms of erasure through the social figure of the “ghost.” It then moves on to test this language and method by examining the “voids” related to the presence and treatment of women and children interned during the First World War at the Spirit Lake camp (1915-1917, Quebec). Based on an exploratory analysis of primary and secondary sources, this approach provides a renewed understanding of the sociopolitical and cultural dynamics surrounding the invisible work of women, racial discrimination against non-naturalized immigrant populations, fear and rumour as drivers of cohesion within the dominant group, and what persists beyond the camp’s closure.

De quoi est fait le vide ? L’indétermination sociale du résistant Emmanuel d’Astier durant l’entre-deux-guerres

Aurélien Raynaud
The desire to make a name for himself, to be known and recognized, was the principle that governed the career of journalist and resistance fighter Emmanuel d’Astier. However, the inter-war years were defined by his inability to satisfy that desire. Made for a world that was disappearing, d’Astier floated through society. His life during the 1920s and 1930s was erratic, the product of a long and unsuccessful quest to find a social role that would give him the public recognition he hoped for. The indolent life he led, dominated by idleness, nurtured a sense of emptiness and deep dissatisfaction. Based on a study of the “d’Astier case,” this article examines both the social experience of emptiness and its social determinants.

L’espace des styles de vie des Français : entre différenciation et distinction

Hervé Glevarec
The sociology of lifestyles seeks to describe and explain the configuration of individuals’ and social groups’ practices and values. It is based on a model of social stratification structured by economic resources and educational attainment, viewed as expressions of social distinction. Since the post-war period, the democratization of consumer goods and the expansion of the cultural sphere have fostered the emergence of a “differentialist” perspective on lifestyles. These two models are tested through a statistical analysis of data from Kantar’s 2020 TGI survey, conducted among 15,049 French respondents aged 15 and over. This survey covers a wide range of domains : hobbies, holidays, cultural and media practices, sports, clothing, diet, household equipment, housing, cars, and retail. Factor analysis reveals two main structuring principles : on the one hand, a differentiation principle shaped by age, gender, and life course ; on the other hand, a principle of distinction linked to economic and cognitive resources. In the discussion section, this article suggests interpreting the first model through the concepts of social-biographical “concernedness” and attachment, and the second through financial and cognitive capacities.

Le régime de vérité pénale : quelle prégnance au fil du temps ? Une enquête dans les thrillers français, du xixe au xxie siècle

Françoise Vanhamme
Situated in the sphere of cultural criminology, this article explores the process of entrenchment over time of a “regime of criminal truth,” by which the state’s criminal interventions are understood as legitimate, well-founded and corresponding to collective aspirations on two grounds : their relevance and necessity. To that end, it explores a corpus of nineteen famous French thrillers published over the second half of the 19th century and beginning of the 21st century. Its approach considers the novel as a site for research that bears witness to representations and preoccupations that occupy the public. It seeks to contribute towards interrogating the role of the criminal justice system in the social regulation of conflicts. Its analysis identifies a clear distance between the visions of the authors consulted and the regime of criminal truth, showing that doubts, preventions and critiques have traversed the public sphere with force and regularity since the development of the contemporary criminal system, thereby weakening any hegemonic ambitions of the regime of criminal truth. It also highlights social logics of regulation that are likely to inform any willingness toward criminal reforms.

Enjeux et défis de l’intégration d’une approche féministe intersectionnelle dans les recherches portant sur les violences sexuelles en milieu d’enseignement supérieur

Ihssane Fethi, Manon Bergeron and Ludivine Tomasso
Several authors have highlighted the importance of adopting an intersectional perspective to understand the scope of sexist and sexual violence in higher education. However, very little research reflects more concretely on how to adopt this perspective and the theoretical, epistemological and methodological issues or challenges it can bring. This article seeks to identify concrete ideas and courses of action for the implementation of an intersectional approach. Following a review of the literature around sexual violence and intersectionality, we address issues and challenges identified through our research. Issues are identified around the conceptualization of analyses, knowledge production and data collection. Courses of action are proposed based on strategies used to address the challenges found.

Un flirt

Jules Pector-Lallemand