From human rights to humanitarian action, from truth and reconciliation commissions to international conventions on refugees, from the integrity of governments to the regulation of finance, from the recognition of gender relations to the legitimization of victim status, from the wearing of the veil to the freedom to have an abortion, from bioethics laws to the ethics of research, morality and politics have not ceased, in recent decades, to question the modalities of life in society and to redefine the boundaries between public and private space. The social question has thus been coupled with a moral one, and in both cases, politics has been put to the test. The Chair is dedicated to this interface between morality and politics.

Historically, the social sciences have adopted a dual approach to the moral question. On the one hand, anthropologists, from Westermarck onwards, and sociologists, with Durkheim and even Weber, took an early interest. On the other hand, they were wary of anything that might imply their own judgements, even though, as Albert Hirschman wrote, the social sciences were built by freeing themselves from them. Recently, however, the social sciences have shown renewed interest in the moral question.

The chairholder has been one of the driving forces behind this revival, developing a critical moral anthropology that takes as its object, on the one hand, the affects and values that agents mobilize in their practices, and on the other, the moral economies that are built up around what society defines as its problems. This dual dimension is at work in many fields, from assistance to the poor to the reduction of inequalities, from the punishment of crime to the reception of exiles, and many others. The theoretical investigation developed within the framework of the Chair is based on ethnographic work combining interviews, observation and participation. It involves questioning the researcher's forms of commitment.