Insights from French Thought, UCC, Ireland.

On Tuesday 22 September at 10am, Professor Sarah Waters will present on Work, Suicide and Social Justice: Insights from French Thought at the University College Cork, Ireland.

In 2025, the French Supreme Court concluded a long-running criminal case against telecoms giant, Orange (formerly France Télécom), by confirming a criminal conviction against company bosses for restructuring policies that had triggered a suicide crisis at the company. This ruling has reaffirmed connections between the individual act of suicide and external social conditions, in this case working conditions, and revived long-standing debates about the meaning and causes of suicide. This paper draws on a Wellcome Trust research project that analyses work-related suicides in the UK, France and Canada from the perspective of social justice. Such a perspective frames suicide not only as a matter of individual mental health, but as a question of collective social justice that concerns the conditions, laws and policies that shape all our working lives. Our project foregrounds issues of recognition, justice and accountability affecting suicidal individuals and their families. Drawing on insights from Emile Durkheim, Michel Foucault and Jean Améry, the paper reflects on the complexities of researching experiences of intense human trauma and on navigating the boundaries between the subjective and the structural, the psychological and the social, the economic and the corporeal.

Sarah Waters is a Professor of French Studies at the University of Leeds and is the lead researcher of a four-year Wellcome Trust research project “Work-related suicide. An international social justice analysis”. Her monograph Suicide Voices. Labour Trauma in France was published by Liverpool University Press in 2020.

More information about this presentation can be found on this link.