Josué Gimel

Josué Gimel works as a postdoctoral student at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, within CESDIP (Center for Sociological Research on Law and Criminal-Justice Institutions), a CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) research unit, on a project titled “Citizenship Futures – The Politics of Hope.” He works as an ethnographer and is in charge of the fieldwork implemented in the 18th and 19th arrondissements of Paris. He was previously a postdoctoral student at Sciences Po’s Observatoire Sociologique du Changement (OSC; Sociological Observatory of Change), working for the French ministry of education as a sociologist and political scientist, investigating social movements of parents opposed to social-mixing policies in schools.

His PhD, awarded in June 2018 from Sciences Po/OSC under the supervision of Marco Oberti, was dedicated to the ethnography of urban public places located in working-class and cosmopolitan neighborhoods in the suburbs of Paris. He proved, in certain conditions, their roles as antidiscriminatory places, reproducing the “cosmopolitan canopy” (Elijah Anderson, 2012) in the Parisian context, and explained the way this canopy works in the everyday life and leisure time of migrants, and in particular in working-class coffee shops where biographies and private aspects of life are told to unknown persons. His recent publications include Quand les « rats de laboratoire » s’opposent à l’expérimentation, a report for the French ministry of education (2020), and, with Virginie Milliot, “Au marché des conversations anonymes : parler de soi en exil”, in the journal Sigila (2019). He is also the author of the book Metaleurop. Mémoire ouvrière, mémoire d’ouvriers (2012), which builds upon his master’s thesis (Mémoire ouvrière, mémoire d’ouvriers. Une analyse sociologique des pratiques mémorielles. Des ouvriers de l’usine Metaleurop), for which he was awarded the Jean Maitron Prize in 2009.