Étienne Ollion - "The Candidates" - Jonathan Levy & Jenny Trinitapoli

Étienne Ollion will discuss The Candidates: Amateurs and Professionals in French Politics. He will be joined in conversation by Jonathan Levy and Jenny Trinitapoli. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op. 

RSVP Here (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required). 

About the book: In 2017, the French political class experienced a small revolution. After decades marked by the ever more pronounced presence of career politicians in positions of power, the country elected a new President with limited experience. And in the aftermath of Emmanuel Macron's victory, an unusual legislature was elected. Rejuvenated, feminised, it was also made up of more than a hundred complete political novices.

In The Candidates, author Étienne Ollion follows an ethnographic journey among these new MPs, while drawing on massive digital data analysed with artificial intelligence methods. The result is a gripping story about their discovery of this peculiar world, which sheds lights on pressing contemporary debates about democratic rejuvenation.

About the author: Étienne Ollion is a CNRS Research Director and Professor of Sociology at l'École Polytechnique. His recent research focuses on the transformations of political fields over the last decades.

About the interlocutors: Jonathan Levy is a professor of history at Sciences Po, Paris. He is the author of Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard University Press, 2014) and Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (Random House, 2022). He was previously a professor in the Department of History and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Jenny Trinitapoli is a professor of Sociology and the Director of the Center for International Social Science Research. Her work bridges the fields of social demography and the sociology of religion. She has written extensively about the role of religion in the AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2008, she has been the principal investigator of Tsogolo la Thanzi, an ongoing longitudinal study of young adults in Malawi, which asks how young adults negotiate relationships, sex, and childbearing in the midst of a severe AIDS epidemic. Trinitapoli is the author of An Epidemic of Uncertainty (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and co-author of Religion and AIDS in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2012).