Career
He is the James Doctorate. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey (the Institute for Advanced Study is not part of Princeton University). Fassin is Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He conducted research in public health in Tunisia and France, and in medical anthropology in Senegal, Congo and Ecuador.
More recently, Fassin developed the field of political and moral anthropology, with empirical studies on Aids and memory in South Africa, disaster and aid in Venezuela, immigration and asylum in France, as well as theoretical inquiries on witnessing and testifying in Palestine, social suffering and trauma in France, and the humanitarian reason from a global perspective.
Within the program, his fieldwork is concentrated on the police, the prison, and the National Court of Asylum. From 2001 to 2003 he was the vice-president of the non-governmental organization Doctors without borders.
