I am a sociologist and a research professor at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientific (CNRS) and am currently serving my second term as President of the French Sociological Association. A qualitativist and an ethnographer, I aim to decipher how social inequalities shape socialization and the social processes through which we are formed, transformed and become who we are. I have studied such processes in Becoming Anorexic (Routledge, 2016) where I charted the social space of the ‘anorexic career’, in the ‘people-thinning institution’ of commercial weight-loss groups and within the French elite school system of “preparatory classes”. My latest research deals with health inequalities and the way in which they can be explained by class and gender socialization, both through a collective study on gender and health (the GENDHI-project), as well as an ethnography of the process of rehabilitation after brain stroke employing the concept of habitus.
Select publications
Darmon, M. (2020) The School Form of the Hospital: How Does Social Class Affect Post-stroke Patients in Rehabilitation Units?, Qualitative Sociology, 43 (2), 2020, p. 235-254.
Darmon, M. (2018) Drafting the ‘time space’. Attitudes towards time among prep school students. European Societies, 20(3): 525-548.
Darmon, M. (2012) A People Thinning Institution. Changing bodies and souls in a commercial weight-loss group. Ethnography, 13(3): 379 – 402.