Sophie Hohmann, sociologist specializing in migration issues in the post-Soviet space and head of the DU Passerelle programme.

What is your academic background (Inalco and outside Inalco)?

I started out by doing two years of law, and very quickly it became apparent that this discipline was too hermetic for me. My career path turned out to be more eclectic. I enrolled at Inalco in Russian in 1992, then in Persian, which I abandoned two years after starting because of the overlaps - you have to remember that at the time we were running between the Clichy (Russian) and Asnières (Persian) teaching centers. I obtained a bachelor's degree in Culture islamique et civilisation musulmane (CICM) from Inalco, then went on to validate a master's degree on family themes in Uzbekistan and a DEA on the epidemiological situation in the same country, under the supervision of Catherine Poujol, professor of Central Asian history. Those were the dark and savage years of the 1990s. I went to Russia in my first year of Russian, I was in the class of Monsieur Michel Chicouène, an incredible, unforgettable and extremely demanding teacher.

Thanks to a grant from the MAE, I went to Tashkent in Uzbekistan for 6 months for my Master's thesis (Master 1), where I was hosted by the IFEAC (Institut français d'Études sur l'Asie centrale) directed at the time by the Hellenist Pierre Chuvin. After defending my master's degree, I went back to Tashkent to work in the cultural department of the French embassy. I ran the Alliance française in Tashkent for a while, and the one in Samarkand for a few months, while continuing my research for my DEA.

At the same time, I took care of an orphanage, helping to supply medicines. We had set up a whole chain with pharmacists in Picardie, the region where I live, and airline pilots...I translated the instructions, I helped out as I could, we worked out little DIY projects, the only things possible at the time, we developed strategies...

I learned a lot from the field, and without Inalco and Catherine Poujol, my teacher on Central Asia, I wouldn't be where I am today... There's no such thing as chance in life, and now we're colleagues at Inalco in the Eurasia department, which is a great career path for me!

Before starting my doctoral thesis, I took a diploma in epidemiology and statistics applied to biology (Inserm and École de médecine). I needed this training to be able to imagine case-control surveys in the field and master the protocol, ethical and statistical issues.

My doctoral thesis, completed at EHESS under the supervision of Alain Blum, focused on power relations and health in Uzbekistan. It is now published by Éditions Petra. I have taken part in numerous ANR (CNRS) and PHARE (Ined) projects, and consulted for the World Bank, Sofreco and the French Ministry of Labor. I also worked in Morocco in rural areas with poor populations and in health centers, where I studied issues of access to healthcare and infant mortality indicators.

Also in the 1990s, I worked extensively in Uzbekistan at a time when the first projects to combat AIDS were being set up in the countries of the former USSR with the TACIS programs, and on drug addiction too. Obviously, in these highly authoritarian and/or illiberal regimes, these issues had no place, and neither did the infected. With Médecins du Monde, I also worked on at-risk groups, notably heroin addicts in Tajikistan in Upper Badakhshan on the border with Afghanistan.

For me, the field is essential, it's at the heart of my research and thinking, of my methodology, theoretical fundamentals are too, but they don't systematically precede fieldwork.

As a sociologist, what are your lines of research? On which cultural area(s) do you work and/or have you worked?

My research and activities have long focused on health issues, the relationship to illness, different therapeutic practices, whether traditional or not, the actors, the strategies of these actors and their ways of resisting authoritarian power, particularly in Central Asia and Russia. I have also worked extensively on social and demographic issues, and social protection systems with my colleague Cécile Lefèvre, Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris. We worked together on these subjects in the three countries of the South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) and on questions of poverty measurement too, which are fascinating issues from a sociological point of view. From 2007-2009, I branched out and became interested in labor migration, having witnessed first-hand the major phenomena of economic migration between the countries of Central Asia and Russia. These processes began in the early 2000s, and sometimes even earlier, depending on the country and the conflict. For almost 15 years now, I've been fascinated by these themes, migrants' strategies, their networks, their modes of organization and decision-making, changes in power relations within patriarchal societies, the division of labor, gender relations, demographic transformations, the role of money (migrants' remittances to their families in their countries of origin), which calls for a rereading of Marcel Mauss's Essai sur le don.

From 2014-2015, I was asked to work on an American project, PIRE - Promoting Urban Sustainability in the Arctic (also involving the Russians, and Norwegians among others), funded by the National Science Foundation. It's a huge project dealing with Arctic issues in many disciplines, notably in the hard sciences, but with a humanities and social sciences component in which my research on the labor migrations of populations originating from Central Asia and the Caucasus and on issues of urban identity in the major cities of the Russian Arctic fits in. With my colleague Marlene Laruelle, formerly of Inalco and now a professor at George Washington University (Washington DC), we have criss-crossed numerous Arctic regions and cities from Murmansk to Yakutia via Norilsk. This project is continuing, and we're planning to visit a small town in Kolyma on the Laptev Sea in two years' time. Of course, the covid epidemic has cut researchers off from their fieldwork, and I don't think Russia has yet been reopened to researchers, but it also allows us to step back from our research, to take the time to read, to revisit certain theoretical contributions that have been put aside or to consolidate others, to nourish our research in other ways.

I am also interested in religion and Islam, particularly among the migrants I study from Central Asia and the Caucasus, and in Islam as a resource that is not only religious but also political and social, whether in Russia or Central Asia. The history of the relationship between power and religion in the imperial era, then in the Soviet era and since the end of the USSR is absolutely fascinating and highly complex. In my Arctic fieldwork, I was fascinated by "polar" Islam and its sociological and multiform translations.

In my research on immigration to the former USSR, I also draw heavily on the work of sociologists such as Sayad and Bourdieu, and Noiriel, to name but a few, who worked on Algerian immigration. I often stress the importance of putting situations in different cultural areas into perspective and not necessarily comparing but rather illuminating one situation with another.

Finally, to end this section on immigration, a central theme of my research, I wanted to mention that with my colleague Laetitia Bucaille, we thematized our Master 1 HSS seminar around a research object that is the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt closed in 1992 and razed in 2004. This subject synthesizes a number of research themes, such as immigration, of course, but also militancy, trade unionism, family strategies, daily life, housing, and so on. Students will therefore have to define their methodology and work either in archives, or conduct interviews with alumni, skilled workers, bosses, social actors, etc. In this way, we draw on a diversity of memory resources and combine methodological theory with different forms of fieldwork! We are fortunate at Inalco to be able to carry out this type of project, and there is real interest on the part of students.

The "ArmenYouth Rest&Rev" project you are carrying out with a colleague from the University of Paris is a winner of the Emergence Idex prize. Has the recent Covid-19 pandemic impacted (or is it still impacting) this project? What solutions did you have to adopt?

Yes, of course our fields were impacted by the pandemic, nevertheless when we wrote the project with my colleague Cécile Lefèvre in May 2020, we were already in the crisis and we were fully aware of what could happen in terms of border closures and restrictions. So during the writing process, we decided to add a French location in Marseille, the historic birthplace of the diaspora after the genocide of 1915. In fact, we carried out our first fieldwork in Marseille at the time of last spring's confinement (2021). This enabled us to start filming interviews (this project has a visual dimension) and to follow the genocide commemorations on April 24. Several other fieldwork sites have been set up in Marseille, as well as interviews conducted at Inalco with students of Armenian origin.

When we wrote our project, we never imagined for a moment that a third Karabagh war would take place. It's been a year since this conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia broke out, and we've added this painful and tragic dimension to the lives of young people (since our project is concerned with plural Armenian youth), those who have been hit hardest by the war in Armenia and those in the diaspora who have left to fight and/or help. We therefore adapt to contingencies whether they be sanitary or geopolitical.

I plan to travel to Armenia in the autumn as part of this project to conduct interviews, but this remains hypothetical.

You are co-organizer of the festival Transcaucases which will run from October to December at Inalco. How did you get involved in this project?

This project is wonderful, and highly original, I took part in the previous Transcaucases festival several years ago and I find the idea of mixing cinema, music, research, book presentations and debates absolutely fascinating and innovative. As I'm passionate about the Caucasus and sensitive to the themes emerging from this extremely rich program, I was delighted when Taline Ter Minassian (Inalco) suggested I co-organize it with her and Anouche Der-Sarkissian, our colleague from Nanterre. I'll be presenting several films and a debate around books on French writers who traveled during the terrible 1930s in the USSR (Caucasus and Ukraine). This festival is important because it allows many actors to speak about this region, which is often misunderstood.

You are in charge of the DU Passerelle at Inalco. Following the mobilization campaign Urgence Afghanistan launched by the Institute and the Inalco Foundation, you will be integrating Afghan students into the DU. What is your role? How will you organize this reception? What are the challenges and hopes? Tell us about your involvement...

I took responsibility for the DU Passerelle in September 2020 so just a year ago. My meeting with Marie-Caroline Saglio-Yatzimirsky, head of the DU H2M (Inalco), who was head of it before me, was fabulous. Thanks to her, I was able to commit to this responsibility very quickly. Although we don't have many students (20 in all over two years), there's a real responsibility and empathy towards the students selected. At inalco, we give all students a chance, whatever their status. This year, in June, we selected 4 Afghans (3 men and one woman) who arrived before the events of this summer. All of them are affected by the situation, having lost at least one parent to the Taliban. The Syrians are also well represented in the DU, and we mustn't forget them.

The Taliban takeover on August 15, and the events that followed until the attack and the departure of the Americans, left us very little time to act in a hurry. With several colleagues and the Inalco Presidency, we did our utmost in liaison with various institutions, the MEAE, the MESRI, etc., to evacuate who we could. The bombing threw a spanner in the works, and now you know the situation. The airport has just reopened its commercial flights, but ticket prices are unaffordable, especially for students.

We have admitted three students (two men and one woman) to the DU Passerelle distance learning program. These students are still stranded in Afghanistan, waiting for a call like the Angel's message...I'm still hopeful that they can be evacuated. A lot is happening right now: the AUF (Agence universitaire de le francophonie), the MEnS (Migrants in Higher Education) are very active and very invested with the French authorities. I'm in daily mail contact with one of the students who tells his story, trying as best he can to keep hope alive despite the omnipresent violence in society. The Fondation Inalco supports us financially and is mobilizing a lot through this campaign for Afghanistan whether to help the DU Passerelle but also researchers at risk (national PAUSE program). We're working with the Foundation to develop other possibilities, as adaptability is absolutely essential in the current context.

In addition, we work a lot with the MEnS network and the AUF which, thanks to its AIMES program (Accueil et intégration des migrants dans l'Enseignement supérieur), funds us in part and supports us a lot. The MEnS network has 42 DU Passerelle students, so from mid-August onwards we've been giving a lot of thought and taking action through this network to allocate the Afghan student files that came to us via the CPU (Conférence des présidents d'universités). The most complicated issues to resolve will undoubtedly relate to housing, as is the case for many students, but we are organizing ourselves through various personal and associative networks. It's important to remember that if we manage to save the students, we don't save their families most of the time, and that's not without consequences for everyone's mental health. We've been encountering these problems for much longer with other populations, especially from Africa and the Middle East. We have a psychology unit as part of the DU Passerelle and DU H2M, which also enables us to work together on these issues. At Inalco, we have a wealth of human and teaching resources, as well as a wealth of ideas. There's a real human disposition and spirit to mobilize to help these students find a place in society, to exist. This year, we've set up a writing workshop for DU Passerelle students, and we'd like to give them the chance to speak out, to write, to "do" with words and ills. We'll see if this results in a writing project.

The question of exile, of the relationship to oneself, is a subject that has also animated me for a long time, when I worked with Chechen communities in particular. I was also a trainer for France Terre d'asile and Forum réfugiés for many years. Issues of vulnerability have always been at the heart of my work and research, whether in the fields of health, social issues or migration... The challenges are immense, and so are the hopes!