Research Interests
Global history, anthropology of labour, workplace ethnography, division of labour, deindustrialisation, labour migration.
Research areas
France, Morocco
Profile
Paul-Alexandre Mermet is a PhD candidate at Leipzig University and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. His work lies in the fields of labour history and labour anthropology, with a particular emphasis on the subjects of migration and local and transnational division of labour within the French automotive industry.
His doctoral research focuses on migrant and foreign labour in the French automotive industry since the 1960s. It pays particular attention to the categorisation and management methods implemented by employers and the reactions of these workers’ to such practices. By combining a historical study of a major French automobile plant from the late 1960s until its closure in the 1990s with an ethnographic study of labour in and around the production site of the same manufacturer in Morocco, the project examines the functions of migrant and foreign labour in the transformations of the French automotive industry as well as how this workforce was shaped as a specific category.
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 postcolonial 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.