Dr Beth Epstein

Mid-Career Fellow 2019

An Ethnographic Inquiry into Shifting Discourses of Diversity and Social Inequality in France

In France as in much of Europe, the first decades of the millennium have been marked by an increase in racially-inflected social tensions, generating intense debate about the capacity of European nation-states to make room for difference, and about the impoverished conceptual means available to meet these challenges in the 21st century.

More information

Research outcomes

Epstein, B. (2020, January 16).

“Les Misérables” by Ladj Ly: the broken promises of the French Republic. The Conversation.

Areas of interest

Anthropology Integration Race Immigration France Western Europe Europe Identity Culture Local Communities Republicanism Social Exclusion

Cohort

MCF4

Biography

Beth Epstein holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University and is Academic Director of New York University Paris. Her research focuses on the politics of integration, race, and immigration in France, especially in relation to the history and development of the post-War French suburbs. Her work also comprises a comparative component, as she addresses how these issues translate between France and the United States.

Dr. Epstein is especially interested in exploring the tension between increasingly reified identity claims and the multiple admixtures of contemporary life. This is a question she has addressed in several publications including Collective Terms: Race, Culture and Community in a State-Planned City in France (Berghahn Books 2011),“The Moral Public Sphere: Integration and Discrimination in a French New Town” in Transatlantic Parallaxes: Toward Reciprocal Anthropology (Raulin & Rogers, eds., Berghahn Books 2015), and “Redemptive Politics: Racial Reasoning in Contemporary France,” Patterns of Prejudice, 2016, vol. 50, no. 2.

Biographical details correct as of 02.10.24