Aude Lejeune

Aude Lejeune is a permanent French CNRS researcher in sociology, affiliated with the CERAPS at the University of Lille. She is currently a visiting researcher at MFO and at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies of the University of Oxford (Fall 2023). Her research focuses on the relationship between law, society, and politics.

After receiving her PhD from the University of Liege and the École Normale Supérieure of Cachan, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and was postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology at MIT and at the City University of New York (2010-2011). As a postdoctoral fellow at the Belgian FRS-FNRS and visiting researcher at the University of Stockholm (2011-2012), she then conducted several research projects on legal mobilization and discrimination in Sweden, the United States, and Belgium. Since 2012, she has worked as CNRS permanent researcher. In 2021, she defended her Habilitation to supervise research at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and presented a dissertation on inequalities in access to the legal system and legal consciousness of private sector employees. Over the past five years, she has taught at the University of Montreal, the University of Lausanne, Sciences Po Lille, the University of Lille and the University of Liege.

She is currently involved in different research projects.

The first one, ‘SoRights’ (« Access to social rights and legal mobilisation »), compares how law people mobilise the legal system to challenge the non-granting of social rights in France and the United Kingdom. It examines under which conditions people turn to courts and how judges handle these cases involving social benefits, according to their professional ethos and local working culture in both countries.

The second project, ‘UNERGY’ (« Uses and contest of public policy in time of energy crisis », supported by National Research Agency and led by Aude Lejeune and Camille Herlin-Giret), explores the development of energy policies that aim to help, encourage and discipline those who are governed; the practices of households to cope with rising energy prices, with a focus on inequalities in the access and use of the state aids or reliance on private market tools between different social groups; and, finally, the individual and collective contestation of how the state manages the energy ‘crisis’. This project is based on the comparison of different territories and on qualitative and quantitative methods to measure and explain territorial (rural/urban) and social (in the broad sense of class, gender and race relations) inequalities in relation to public action.

Aude Lejeune is also currently working on her book manuscript on inequalities in access to justice for private sector employees who experience injustice in the workplace (based on her HDR manuscript). Her book examines how reforms of access to justice have led to a reduction in the number of cases brought before the courts and created inequalities among employees depending on their social status and gender. This research also shows that legal professionals (lawyers, legal services) contribute to reinforcing inequalities between employees who already have initial legal skills and those who remain outside the law.