Research Interests
Global history; labour anthropology; political economy; decolonisation; deindustrialisation; labour regimes; labour agency.
Research areas
France, Latin America
Profile
Paul-Alexandre Mermet is a PhD candidate at the Research Centre Global Dynamics, Leipzig University, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Applied Foreign Languages from the Université de Lorraine in Nancy, France, and a Master of Arts in European Studies from Leipzig University, Germany. His master’s thesis focused on the relationship between the French Left and migrant workers during and after the social movement of May and June 1968 in France. It explored the ways the Left perceived and approached migrant workers in the wake of decolonisation, how it made sense of specific issues and situations of the workers, and how they produced knowledge and theory on these questions.
His doctoral research combines a global-historical and ethnographic approach and investigates the entanglements between decolonisation and the globalisation of production in the latter half of the 20th century and how these continue to impact and reshape factory work from a labour perspective. The working title of the dissertation is “Global Entanglements of Production: Labour in the French Automobile Industry at the Prism of Decolonisation and Deindustrialisation.”