Annabelle Allouch

Annabelle Allouch is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Picardie-Jules Verne (CURAPP-ESS) and an associate researcher at the Institut national de l'Audiovisuel (INA). Her main field of expertise is Sociology of education and especially Higher education with a special interest for Access and social justice.

After her PhD at Sciences Po Paris on the sociology of widening participation policies in elite education in a comparative perspective (France/UK), her current research focuses on meritocracy and the production and circulation of hierarchies and academic rankings in France and in the Anglo-American world, from a perspective inspired by political sociology, the sociology of law, the sociology of emotions as well as material culture.

She currently coordinates two research projects on the judicialization of admissions to Higher education  (called “Suing Alma Mater”) and the modes of contestation of the school judgement (with Delphine Espagno-Abadie), funded by the Défenseur des droits, the INJEP (Ministry of Youth and Sport) as well as the Research group of the  French Ministry of Justice.

In parallel, she is working with French artist Thomas Tudoux on a collaborative research project about meritocracy and the representations of one’s merit and excellence,  which was funded by la Maison européenne des sciences de l’homme. This is part of a more recent interest in art, memory and the material culture of Higher education, which will be at the centre of her next book.

At the MFO, she will explore the comparative aspects of these projects, with a special interest in the effects of the marketization of the British education system on students and their families.

She has published three books on meritocracy, access and inequalities in higher education : La Société du concours. L'empire des classements scolaires, published by Seuil/La République des idées in 2017 ;  Mérite, published by Anamosa in 2021 and Les nouvelles portes des Grandes écoles (PUF, 2022). She has co-edited several journal issues on the sociology of higher education, the notion of anxiety as captured by the social sciences, and representations of masculinities in the media. On the basis of her ethnography of higher education, she has also published several articles in journals such as the British Journal of Sociology, the British Journal of Sociology of education, l’Année sociologique or la Revue française de Sociologie.

She was already a Visiting scholar at Oxford University -and a resident at the MFO!- in 2008/2009 before she became a Visiting researcher at the Minda de Gunzburg Centre for European Studies at Harvard University (2015/2016). She is currently on a sabbatical year (delegation CNRS) at the Institut des sciences sociales du Politiques (ISP), located at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre.

In 2022, she became the co-editor of the academic journal La vie des idées (Collège de France).