Pauline Blum

For the last ten years or so, my research has focused on the daily lives and experiences of people with disabilities and/or dependency and those of their relatives, as well as on the working conditions of the care workers who support them. The situations of disability/vulnerabilitý vary according to the age of the person, the type of difficulties and care, and how long they last. Over the course of my projects, these people have included young adults with mental disabilities, ageing people with chronic illnesses, and young adults who are inactive because they are outside school and the job market. Two general sociological questions guide my work. How do you make a shaky everyday life viable? How do you deal with the vagaries of family reproduction?

To answer these questions, I study the social experience of difficulties in everyday life, how they vary according to the social determinants of gender and class, and according to social positions and trajectories. I also look at how these difficulties are rooted in the material conditions of life, and how they are shaped by social policies. My analysis of the difficulties of daily life, which are interesting for their own sake, is part of a wider reflection on the categories of mental disability and crisis, as well as on decisions made on behalf of others, the home and cohabitation. It provides a bottom-up perspective on a number of developments in care policies, particularly in the medical and social field.

To carry out this work, I have mainly engaged in qualitative surveys (long immersion, serial interviews, observations of institutions and use of professional writings, family monographs).

I am currently working on the conditions of access to autonomy policies; the advancing age and experience of ageing of people with Parkinson's disease; school-related psychological disorders.

Key words: health and mental health, family, life stages, social inequalities and vulnerabilities, school, social and medico-social policies.