Claire Demesmay

Claire Demesmay is an expert in Franco-German cooperation, currently professor at the Alfred Grosser Chair at Sciences Po Paris and associate researcher at the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin. She holds a doctorate in political philosophy from the Sorbonne - Paris 4 University and the Technical University of Berlin, and a teaching qualification in Germanic Studies. Her research focuses on Franco-German cooperation in Europe, the European and foreign policies of France and Germany, and the attitudes of young people and the representations of social actors.

The project

Title: Identity representations of European citizens - case study in the french-german border region

"The research project aims to explore the identity representations of "mobile citizens" within the European space - through a case study in the Franco-German border region. These migrants of a new kind, whom Favell and Recchi refer to as the "pioneers of European identity", represent a migration phenomenon that is still recent and very much in the minority, and are therefore still little studied. They are among the first generations of Europeans to experience citizenship conceived within a supranational framework, and to experience on a daily basis the opportunities and challenges of multiculturalism and transculturalism within the European space. The aim of this project is to study the transmission of identity representations and related behaviors within Franco-German families on either side of the border between France and Germany. Indeed, the family setting represents a context conducive to interpersonal interactions and negotiations, and appears to be a "place of transmission or non-transmission of values" (Haque, 2019), in which children, particularly at the time of adolescence, position themselves as central actors of change, but also of the perpetuation of a certain heritage (Varro, 1995). Thus, the concept of trajectory used by Kaufmann (2004) to understand identity dynamics, highlighting individual choices and the resulting bifurcations, is directly linked to that of transmission."

Hosting institution: Sciences Po - Centre de Relations Internationales (CRI)

Selective Bibliography

• Jongler avec les langues et avec les cultures (Peter Lang, 2024)
• Franco-German Relations seen from Abroad: Post-war Reconciliation in International Perspectives (Springer, 2020 – dir., avec N. Colin)
• Idées reçues sur l’Allemagne. Un modèle en question (Le cavalier bleu, 2018)
• Images et stéréotypes. Perceptions franco-allemandes en temps de crise (Fondation Heinrich Böll, 2016 – avec Christine Pütz)