François Brasdefer

François Brasdefer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre de recherches sociologiques sur le droit et les institutions pénales (CESDIP), working on public policy evaluation and drug trafficking prevention in France.

His first area of specialisation is the study of vandalism and ownership, with a PhD from the Université de Lille in 2019. Interested in every form of property damage, he studied in depth graffiti and street-art practises, but also activists’ practices in anti-capitalist or radical environmentalist groups. Aside from forthcoming articles and multiple conferences, his publications on the topic include a paper in Deviance et Société (2015), a chapter for the Groupe Européen de Recherches sur les Normativitiés (GERN) (2019) and a new publication on French activists often portrayed as “casseurs”.

Rooted in sociology of deviance and critical criminology, his works on vandalism also led to his current project at the Maison Française d’Oxford : translating Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) into French language.

François’s research interests include : socialisation processes, biographical analysis, social relations, power relations, moral panics, social class, gender, age relations, governmentality, informal social control, subject-object relations and epistemology.