by Isabelle Thireau (EHESS Paris / CNRS / Professeure invitée MSH)

In collaboration with LAMC

This talk is based on a study of three types of gatherings observed in Tianjin, a city in northern China, between 2011 and 2017. These gatherings pursue highly contrasting aims (performing physical exercises in a public square, investigating buildings threatened with destruction in an attempt to preserve them, and gathering within Protestant assemblies).

They are also embedded in specific forms of publicness. Developing the first example further, the aim of this talk is to describe and analyze these gatherings as fragile “intermediary publics” where, through different forms of connection between the particular and the general but also between the singular and the collective, new sources of legitimation are consolidated, new types of knowledge are constituted, and multiple indeterminacies become less undetermined.

Isabelle Thireau is Professor of Sociology at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris) and Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Affiliated with the Center for Studies on Modern and Contemporary China (CECMC – CCJ), her interests include the sociology of norms, sense of justice and intermediary publics in China with fieldworks in Guangdong, Anhui, Beijing and Tianjin.

Among her recent publications : Des lieux en commun. Une ethnographie des rassemblements publics en Chine, Places in Common. An Ethnography of Public Gatherings in China, Paris, Éditions des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2020; « Being Together at a Distance, Talking and Avoiding Talk », The China Quarterly, 246, 2021, 428-446.

Thuesday 15th of april 2025, from 14h00 to 16h00

Salle P3.1.304
Batiment P3 - Niveau 1
Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50
1050 Ixelles

Open entry