Didier Fassin - "Exile" - Khalid Lyamlahy

Name: Didier Fassin - "Exile" - Khalid Lyamlahy
Start: 2026-04-01T16:00:00-05:00
Location: 5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637

Schedule

Wed, 01 Apr, 2026 at 04:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637 | Chicago, IL

Didier Fassin will discuss his new book "Exile: Chronicle of the Border." He will be joined in conversation by Khalid Lyamlahy. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion.
At the Co-op
About the Book: In recent decades, the forced displacement of populations has fueled nationalism and xenophobia across the world, arousing fear and hostility. Policies have been implemented to deter migrants, crack down on humanitarian workers and externalize border monitoring in remote territories. Men, women and children who flee political violence, religious persecution or poverty in their country and set off on journeys often lasting years may find themselves on dangerous routes where they face police brutality, gang rackets, confinement camps, barbed-wire fences, the rigors of the desert and the perils of the sea. Many lose their lives.
But what do we really know about the experience of these people, the hazards they encounter, repression they endure, and the assistance they receive? This is what Didier Fassin and Anne-Claire Defossez set out to uncover through the research they conducted at the border between Italy and France, in a region of the Alps that has become, since the mid-2010s, a privileged site of passage for people arriving in Europe from Afghanistan, Iran, the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. Over a period of five years, they collected their poignant stories, participated in the activities of a shelter, took part in mountain rescue operations, interviewed politicians, policy makers and law enforcement officers. Their investigation reveals the ineffectiveness of the militarization of the border and the dismay of the police who are aware of the futility of their mission; it attests to the solidarity and commitment of the volunteers; and it explores the form of life of exiles, which has become a defining feature of our time.
This timely and well-researched book will be of great value to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, politics and geography, and to anyone interested in migration and refugees today.
About the Author: Didier Fassin is Professor at the Collège de France on the chair Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies. He is also the James D. Wolfensohn Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Previously professor at the University of Paris North, he was the founding director of IRIS, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Social Sciences at CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
Anthropologist, sociologist and physician, he conducted extensive research in Senegal, South Africa, Ecuador, and France. After years spent as assistant professor in internal medicine and public health, he turned to the social sciences, initially developing research in a domain he described as a political anthropology of health. Later, being laureate of an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, he elaborated a political and moral anthropology which he put to work through a ten-year ethnography of police, justice and prison. He then developed a critical engagement with philosophical approaches to punishment, which was the matter of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley, and to life, which was the topic of his Adorno Lectures, at the Goethe University of Frankfurt.
He also gave the inaugural Lemkin Lecture at Rutgers on resentment and ressentiment, the Tumin Lecture at Princeton on the life of things, the Eric Wolf Lecture at the University of Vienna on conspiracy theories, the Bernt Lambert Memorial Lecture at Cornell on legal anthropology, the Roger Hood Lecture at Oxford on border violence, and two inaugural lectures at the Collège de France titled The Inequality of Lives and The Social Sciences in Times of Crisis. The first social scientist to be granted the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award, he developed a program on crisis and its multiple meanings on a global scale, which was the topic of his Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia. Frequently intervening in the media, in schools, in professional institutions and in front of general audiences on issues related to his research, he has proposed a theoretical reflection on the public presence of the social sciences, which he presented in his recipient lecture for the Gold Medal in anthropology at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
He created a Summer Program in Social Science for early-career scholars from the Global South at the Institute for Advanced Study. Former Vice-President of Médecins Sans Frontières, he is President of the French Medical Committee for Exiles. Having been on the Scientific Council of the City of Paris for fifteen years, he is a member of the National Ethics Advisory Committee for Health Sciences. Elected at the American Philosophical Society and the Academia Europaea, he has Honorary Doctorates from the University of Liège and the Free University of Brussels. In 2025, he was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal, which is the highest distinction of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
His most recent work focuses on the political violence experienced by migrants and refugees along their journey, based on research conducted at the border between Italy and France, and on the moral failure characterizing the international reactions to the destruction of Gaza and decimation of its population. They have resulted in scientific publications and two series of lectures as well as conferences at the Collège de France.
He authored twenty-four books translated in thirteen languages and edited thirty collective volumes. He occasionally writes for The New York Times, The Nation, The Atlantic, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, La Repubblica, Le Monde, Libération, and is a regular contributor to Alternatives Économiques.
About the Interlocutor: Khalid Lyamlahy is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Chicago (Department of Romance Languages & Literatures) where he teaches and works mainly on North African literature. He is the author of Nostalgic Rebels: Politics, Aesthetics, and Selfhood in Postcolonial Morocco (2025) and the coeditor of Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond (2020), both published by Liverpool University Press. He has also published two novels: Un roman étranger (2017) and Évocation d’un mémorial à Venise (2023) with Présence Africaine in Paris. His second novel received several prizes and was translated by Ros Schwartz as "Venice Requiem", published by HopeRoad in the UK.