School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Politics. The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

The world inside out: What is at stake in deconstructing the west?

Abstract: The genealogy of postcolonial and subaltern studies is traced by focusing on the postmodern and postcolonial critique of democracy. The appropriation of Indian subaltern studies by Africans and Afro-Americans is then analyzed; and the effort, made to position contemporary African art in the context of an upsurge of multiculturalism at the international level. Attention is then turned to the debate about postcolonialism among persons associated with this trend. Two contradictory characteristics of postcolonialism and subalternism are exposed: the indigenous, nativistic withdrawal into one's self and the new routes opened toward universalism.

A parsimonious model for spatial transmission and heterogeneity in the COVID-19 propagation

Abstract: Raw data on the cumulative number of deaths at a country level generally indicate a spatially variable distribution of the incidence of COVID-19 disease. An important issue is to determine whether this spatial pattern is a consequence of environmental heterogeneities, such as the climatic conditions, during the course of the outbreak. Another fundamental issue is to understand the spatial spreading of COVID-19. To address these questions, we consider four candidate epidemiological models with varying complexity in terms of initial conditions, contact rates and non-local transmissions, and we fit them to French mortality data with a mixed probabilistic-ODE approach. Using standard statistical criteria, we select the model with non-local transmission corresponding to a diffusion on the graph of counties that depends on the geographic proximity, with time-dependent contact rate and spatially constant parameters. This original spatially parsimonious model suggests that in a geographically middle size centralized country such as France, once the epidemic is established, the effect of global processes such as restriction policies, sanitary measures and social distancing overwhelms the effect of local factors. Additionally, this modeling approach reveals the latent epidemiological dynamics including the local level of immunity, and allows us to evaluate the role of non-local interactions on the future spread of the disease. In view of its theoretical and numerical simplicity and its ability to accurately track the COVID-19 epidemic curves, the framework we develop here, in particular the non-local model and the associated estimation procedure, is of general interest in studying spatial dynamics of epidemics.

The ideal of the person: Recovering the novelty of Durkheim’s sociology. Part II: Modern society, the cult of the person, and the sociological project:

Abstract: The aim of this article is to clarify the difference between the anthropological category of the person, as analyzed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), and the modern ideal of a free...

The birth of the political economy or the economy in the heart of politics: mercantilism

Abstract: Mercantilism (16th–18th centuries) is a set of precepts concerning economic policy. It places the State at the heart of national economic development. Wealth is conceived as serving power. Mercantilists share a static conception of international economic relations, considering that one country can only enrich itself to the detriment of another. It is a true theory of economic war. However, the development of mercantilism shows a progressive transition of economic thought towards a lower consideration of political aspects.

Drawing problems: thought in action:

Abstract: I investigate some aspects of the structure of the production of drawings by developing a practice-based phenomenology articulated around some “drawing problems.” The examples I chose cluster aroun...