Intervention de Geoffrey Pleyers sur le cas de Jason Arday

Au cours de la session inaugurale du congrès européen de sociologie, Geoffrey Pleyers est revenu sur la disparition de Jason Arday, sociologue et professeur à l’université de Cambridge, disparu cet été après une violente campagne initiée par l’extrême-droite :

"For a long time, we thought that witch-hunt campaigns targeting individual sociologists were limited to authoritarian regimes and Trump’s MAGA movement. We believed that Europe was immune to the worst drifts of reactionary attacks.

We are meeting 11 days after Jason Arday took his life. We live at a time when, once again, some people and scholars consider that a black person should not become a professor of sociology in a prestigious European university.

We will need more time for a full analysis of what happened. Still, it is clear that, as a community of sociologists, we failed to analyse and denounce much earlier and collectively the magnitude of the witch-hunt campaign orchestrated by far-right intellectuals and extensively covered in mainstream media. We failed to defend a colleague who deserved to be treated with respect and care, in a world that leaves little space for those who are different.

As much as integrity and an ethical commitment to facts and rigor, care should be a cornerstone of a European and global community of sociologists. We will miss Jason Arday’s presence and his analysis and contributions to a better understanding of our societies, particularly in the field of higher education, mental health and the study of racism."

Geoffrey Pleyers, President of the International Sociological Association (ISA), 17th congress of the European Sociological Association, Warsaw, 23 August 2026.

Full address available here: https://www.isa-sociology.org/sites/default/files/2026-09/ESA-Conference-2026-opening.pdf