Senior Lecturer at the Graduate Institute’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology (ANSO), Yvan Droz is a researcher in various issues related to development, agriculture, gender and religion in Africa, Latin America, France, Canada and Switzerland. He presents here a short summary of his recent and current activities.

Can you tell us about your latest research projects and publications?

I’ve just completed two projects on religious mobility with a team of researchers. With these colleagues we also submitted the manuscript of a book that is the outcome of another project, “Perpetuum Mobile: The Art of Religious Practices”. This apart, on 22 November Fenneke Reysoo, also from the ANSO Department, Laurent Amiotte-Suchet, from the University of Lausanne, and I will launch a book that we have coauthored. Titled La petite entreprise au péril de la famille? L’exemple de l’Arc jurassien franco-suisse, it is the second outcome of a project that ended in 2015, “Rupture de trajectoires familiales dans les petites entreprises”. A first, edited volume already came out in 2015.

What are you currently working on?

I am working on a project called “Living Rights in Translation: An Interdisciplinary Approach of Working Children’s Rights” with Professors Karl Hanson and Frédéric Darbellay, from the Centre for Children's Rights Studies at the University of Geneva. It is funded by the Swiss National Science Foudation and will be completed by 2018. We explore how child labour is considered by Senegalese people and how children’s ethos can contradict the international ethics of children’s rights. International conventions on children’s rights provide a universalised definition that often is not consistent with local systems of values. For instance, if a child does not work, this may force her mother to work and hinder her from taking care of her child. Thus, we also have to consider the unexpected consequences of the prohibition of child labour.

Concerning your research trajectory, do you see a continuity or rather a divergence between your current interests and your earlier works?

The broader questions have remained the same: What do people think is “good” or “bad”? How does one succeed in one’s life? What does “self-accomplishments” mean for men and women? Those questions revolve around local moralities and have been at the core of my work since my doctoral research in Kenya (Migrations kikuyus: des pratiques sociales à l’imaginaire, 1999). Then, I was interested in Swiss and French farmers and what it takes to be a good farmer. So, my research questions have remained constant – yet in ever-renewed ways – while the fieldworks have changed. This coherence can also be seen in the three project proposals that we will submit on the current deadlocks triggered by “traditional” local moralities in East Africa.

• More information on the project “Living Rights in Translation: An Interdisciplinary Approach of Working Children’s Rights
• More information on Dr Droz’s interest in religious mobility

Interview by Sucharita Sengupta, PhD student in Anthropology and Sociology

Illustration: Child Selling in Typical Shop, Mar Lodj, Senegal, 25 January 2012. By Jean Marc Demol, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.