Sébastien Michiels, winner of the award of the Forum "Vies mobiles" ("Mobile lives")
Dr. Sébastien Michiels, Research engineer and post-doctoral fellow at the DIAL Laboratory of the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), who has been associated with the Department of Social Sciences at the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP) for several years, is the winner of the award of the Forum "Vies mobiles" ("Mobile lives"), which rewards each year PhD works on the issue of mobility (3 candidates selected out of 40 applications in the category "francophone thesis”). His thesis, entitled "Labour markets and circulation in India. A mixed and multi-scale approach to internal work migration", and an abstract, will be published shortly on the website of the Forum (www.forumviesmobiles.org), which is very active on issues related to mobility and its links to numerous societal and environmental issues.
This thesis studies the complexity and the diversity of migratory flows internal to contemporary India and the way these flows adapt to the structural transformations of the work environment. Adopting a socio-economical perspective and using different scales and tools of analysis, the thesis shows how migration is shaped by inequalities of multiple nature (spatial, caste, gender inequalities, etc.) but also how it reconfigures and renews them. We congratulate Sébastien Michiels for this great achievement!