Dominique Pasquier has passed away
14 April 2025
Long associated with the Centre d’Études des Mouvements Sociaux (CEMS) at the EHESS, she developed a series of studies on the reception of television series and soap operas, with a particular interest in the practices of young people and their use of the media, one of the most original of which is the reception of the sitcom « Hélène et les garçons » (La culture des sentiments, 1999). In Cultures lycéennes. La tyrannie de la majorité (2005), she emphasizes the importance of peer-to-peer sociability in this age group and incorporates the Internet into her analysis. Another crucial aspect of her work has been her constant commitment to giving voice to working-class cultural practices, ignored by much of Communication Studies, which too often tends to survey affluent or student circles for methodological convenience.
From this triple focus on reception, adolescent interpersonal sociability and the cultural uses of the working class, and in the face of the change in media practices that came with the advent of the Internet, Dominique Pasquier began to take an interest in digital universes and joined the Economic and Social Sciences Laboratory of Telecom Paris in 2008, which later became a team of the UMR i3. There, she continued her work on migrant communication, a topic she had been working on since the early 2000s (Les migrants connectés. TIC, mobilités et migration, Réseaux, 2010, with Dana Dominescu) and also became interested in amateur film criticism (« Moi, je lui donne 5/5« , 2014, with Valérie Beaudouin and Thomas Legon). At the same time, she conducted a pioneering study on online uses in rural areas (L’internet des familles modestes. Enquête dans la France rurale, 2018). She initiated research on tutorials and popularization videos, later leading it at Centre de recherche sur les liens sociaux (CERLIS), which she joined in 2019. Her ability to work with everyone has had a profound impact on the study of the digital world at i3, and throughout the sociology of reception in France and beyond, always infusing it with a concern to analyze the use of new social media in the social body as a whole, without neglecting modest backgrounds, even if field work there may be more challenging.