• Comment: See WP:BLP. Statements need to be sourced or removed. Here, large portions are entirely unsourced. Greenman (talk) 15:32, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

Cécile Van de Velde is a French sociologist specializing in youth, life transitions, and social inequalities. She is a professor at the Université de Montréal and holds the Canada Research Chair in Social Inequalities in Life Transitions.^[1]

She has written several books, including Devenir adulte. Sociologie comparée de la jeunesse en Europe^[1] (PUF, 2008, Le Monde Prize for University Research) and Sociologie des âges de la vie^[2] (Armand Colin, 2015). She is a member of the Montreal Research Center on Social Inequalities, Discriminations and Alternative Practices of Citizenship (CREMIS).^[3]

Cécile Van de Velde studied at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan and earned her PhD in sociology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her research focuses on comparative studies of youth transitions, adulthood, and generational identities in different social and cultural contexts. Before joining the Université de Montréal, she was a professor at the Université de Toulouse and a researcher at EHESS.^{[citation needed]}

Her expertise on youth issues led her to hold several official positions in French society: in 2006, she became scientific advisor at the Center for Strategic Analysis, serving the Prime Minister, where she covered issues of youth policy and intergenerational relations. She was appointed a member of the Scientific Council of the City of Paris in 2008, a member of the Franco-British Council in 2010, and a member of the High Council for the Family in 2013. In the same year, she was appointed by the Prime Minister to sit on the National Commission on the Future of Pensions, chaired by Yannick Moreau, where she defended the perspective of the younger generations, and contributed to the report "Our Pensions Tomorrow: Financial Balance and Justice" (also known as the "Moreau Report"), which was submitted to the Prime Minister on June 13, 2013. She also became scientific director of the Observatoire national de la vie étudiante (National Observatory of Student Life) and coordinated a new three-year version of the Enquête nationale sur les conditions de vie des étudiants (National Survey on Student Living Conditions). At the same time, she contributed, in collaboration with Camille Peugny, to the writing of the documentary "Génération quoi",^[4] directed by Lætitia Masson, which offers a three-part portrait of the younger generations in French society, accompanied by an interactive survey of more than 400,000 young adults. In 2015, she received the National Order of Merit.

In 2012, she was invited to be a professor at the University of Montreal, which had a profound influence on her research and her career. As a direct witness of the "Maple Spring" student movement, she then began researching the anger of young people at an international level. She became a professor of sociology at the same university in 2015, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Social Inequalities and Life Courses. In 2021 and 2022, she spent a year at Harvard University, where she participated in the scientific activities of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. In 2023, she became vice-president of the Emotions and Society research network of the International Sociological Association. From that year onwards, she also served as a member of the Board of Directors of the SNCF Foundation and as a member of the Scientific Council of the CNAF (Caisse nationale des allocations familiales) in France.

In her work Becoming an Adult. Comparative sociology of youth in Europe,^[5] published in 2008, Van de Velde develops a comparative approach to youth as a stage of life in Western Europe. Based on a qualitative and statistical survey conducted in Denmark, the United Kingdom, France and Spain, she explores to what extent youth experiences still vary from one society to another. In particular, she identifies four major models of youth in Western Europe: The social democratic model of northern Europe, Liberal model of the United Kingdom, Corporatist model of France,and Family model in Spain.

This comparative perspective contributes to better understanding the specificities of the French youth model in the public debate, by showing to what extent early determination by the diploma marks all the student, family and professional experiences of young French people, right down to their very representations of adulthood, considered, more than elsewhere, as the age of stability. She then deepened the analysis of this French model of youth in several collective works. : in the book Youth Policies : the great misunderstanding  (2012), coordinated with Valérie Becquet and Patricia Loncle, it sheds light on the multiple contradictions and dead ends of youth policy in France. In the issue Repenser les inégalités entre générations of the Revue Française de Sociologie  (2013), she invites, with her co-author Camille Peugny, to take better account of the political and social consequences of the rise in inequalities between generations within French society since the 1960s. Finally, in the book Student Lives : trends and inequalities  (2016), coordinated with Jean-François Giret and Élise Verley, she identifies the significant changes in student trajectories in France, still marked by a strong linearity but with some inflections, such as the rise of student employment and the phenomenon of accumulation of diplomas.

In 2015, she published Sociology of the Ages of Life  (Armand Colin, 2015), where she extended her perspective to all life paths . She defends the need to break with a segmented conception of ages, in order to propose a transversal reading, from birth to death, of the evolutions of contemporary existences. It shows how increasingly blurred and complex boundaries between education, work and retirement challenge our inherited representations of the ages of life in three main scansions - youth, adulthood, old age - and invite us to rethink what it means " to grow " And " to grow old » throughout life paths. According to her, we should move from a " age politics » to a « course policy ", in order to change the social organization of existence and the possible navigations between studies, employment, inactivity. By mobilizing a comparative perspective, it sheds light on the way in which different contemporary social models currently regulate this organization of the ages of life and structure the social relations of generations differently in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008 .

In her more recent research, she broadens her comparative approach to the global level, and argues for the importance of capturing the social and political emotions of youth, such as anger, revolt, and hope . In an article published in Social Movement Studies  in 2022 and which is now among the 10 most read articles of all time in this journal, she demonstrates the interest in developing a comparative analysis of slogans and " words of anger » carried within multiple youth social movements that have marked the post-2008 period, from the Indignados to more recent environmental movements. She extends these reflections in an article published in International Sociology in 2023, to show the rise of a rhetoric of injustice between generations over the last decade. : initially focused on economic inequalities between generations in a reaction to the 2008 crisis, this rhetoric gradually broadened to the question of political, environmental and social inequalities between generations . It is associated with a global discourse of dispossession and the refusal of a generational heritage considered too heavy to bear for the " future generations ". She then extends this research in a chapter published in 2024 in the Research Handbook on Transitions into Adulthood  : it draws on around a hundred interviews conducted internationally with young adults to identify some common trends that emerge across borders within family and social relationships between generations . Among these trends, she highlights the massive and constrained mobilization of family solidarity, a rising critique of the " meritocracy ", a growing tension between young people and their " system ", and a feeling of generational injustice that is particularly strong among young students and graduates.

At the same time, for the past ten years or so, she has been conducting research on loneliness, and has made a significant contribution to the emergence of a sociological approach to the subject. During her research on young people, she was struck by the growing sense of loneliness among the younger generations. This observation led her to initiate research on loneliness at different stages of life, which received the Red Cross Foundation Prize in 2013. In an article published in the journal Sociologie et sociétés in 2018, she defends a sociological approach to loneliness in a field dominated by psychology, considering loneliness not only as an intimate phenomenon, but also as a social phenomenon, whose causes and consequences are played out at the socio-political and structural level. She shows how this approach makes it possible to grasp new faces of loneliness, such as juvenile loneliness or digital loneliness. In an article in the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth co-published in 2023 with Stéphanie Boudreault and Laureleï Berniard, she takes a particular interest in the rise of loneliness among young people: Based on a survey of their experiences of loneliness during the pandemic, she shows that, beyond the suffering of isolation, the discourse was dominated by existential loneliness, linked to the pressure to rebuild a present and a future in times of uncertainty, and political loneliness, linked to a feeling of abandonment by the state during the pandemic measures. It also identifies the existence of extreme and cumulative loneliness among some more vulnerable young people.

• Canada Research Chair in Social Inequalities and Life Courses, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Government of Canada, 2015-2025^[6]
• Chevalière de l'ordre national du Mérite, French Republic, appointed by decree of the President of the Republic on May 15, 2015^[7]
• 2014 Italia Prize "Special Prize for an exceptional, innovative and creative project": collective prize for the transmedia investigation "Génération quoi?" (series of 3 documentaries and participative consultation via the Internet), 2014.
• Senior Research Prize of the Red Cross-Red Cross Foundation for Social Bonding, for the research "Loneliness through the ages", 2013.^{[citation needed]}
• Le Monde Prize for university research for the book "Becoming an adult. A comparative sociology of youth in Europe" (Presses Universitaires de France, 2008).^{[citation needed]}

• VAN DE VELDE Cécile. Sociologie des âges de la vie. Collection 128. Dunod, 2015, 128 p.^[8]
• VAN DE VELDE Cécile. Devenir adulte. Sociologie comparée de la jeunesse en Europe. Presses Universitaires de France, 2008.^[9]
• VAN DE VELDE Cécile. "Emotions and politics", Lien social et politiques, no. 86, 2021, 224 p. Download the introduction: "The political power of emotions", co-edited with Anne PERRIARD.^{[citation needed]}
• VAN DE VELDE Cécile (ed.). "Solitudes contemporaines", Sociologie et Société, vol. 1, no. 1, 2018, 272 p.^[10]
• GIRET Jean-François, VAN DE VELDE Cécile, and VERLEY Elise (eds). Les vies étudiantes. Tendances et inégalités. Paris: La Documentation Française, 2016, 312 p.^[11]
• PEUGNY Camille, and VAN DE VELDE Cécile (eds). "Rethinking inequalities between generations", Revue Française de Sociologie, vol. 54, no. 4, 2013.^[12]
• BECQUET Valérie, LONCLE Patricia, and VAN DE VELDE Cécile (eds). Politiques de jeunesse : le grand malentendu. Champs social, 2012.^[13]
• VAN DE VELDE Cécile. "Global perspectives on youth and intergenerational relations in the 21st century." In Jenny Chesters (ed.), Research Handbook on Transitions into Adulthood (pp. 115-128). Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781839106972.00019.^[14]
• VAN DE VELDE Cécile. "What have you done to our world?": The rise of a global generational voice, International Sociology, 38, no 4 (2023): 431-457. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/02685809231180880.^[15]
• VAN DE VELDE Cécile, BOUDREAULT Stéphanie, and BERNIARD Laureleï. "Youth loneliness in pandemic times: a qualitative study in Quebec and Ontario," International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 28, no. 1 (2023). DOI: 10.1080/02673843.2023.2223671.^[16]
• VAN DE VELDE Cécile. "The power of slogans: using protest writings in social movement research", Social Movement Studies, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2022.2084065.^[17]
• VAN DE VELDE Cécile. "A global student anger? A comparative analysis of student movements in Chile (2011), Quebec (2012), and Hong-Kong (2014)", Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, published online on May 18, 2020.^[18]

• "The rise of loneliness among young people is a strong and structural trend of the last two decades", Le Monde, by Alice Raybaud, October 10, 2024.
• "For some young people, the COVID-19 pandemic radicalizes a feeling of powerlessness and anger", Le Monde, interview with Marine Miller, June 2, 2021, p. 17.
• "The Covid crisis questions our relationship with loneliness", Fondationdefrance.org, Fondation de France, December 4, 2020.
• "This generation of young people feels the finiteness of the world", Le Monde, interview with Marine Miller, April 19, 2019.
• "Portrait of angry young people who oppose the 'machine'", Le Devoir, interview with Stéphane Baillargeon, March 10, 2018.
• "Daring the long term to find oneself", Le Monde, interview with Laure Belot, November 22, 2017, p. 4-5.
• "What makes young people angry is not being able to choose", AlterEcoPlus, interview with Vincent Grimault, March 2016.
• "Rencontre avec... Cécile Van de Velde" - "Nous avons collectivement du mal à penser la vie comme un parcours à construire", Actualités sociales hebdomadaires, interview with Jérôme Vachon, no. 2948, pp. 36-37.
• "French youth feel scorned and dream of fighting back" (with Camille Peugny), Le Monde, interview with Pascale Kremer, February 24, 2014.
• "Becoming an adult, what a big deal", Press Europ, interview with Matias Guerrido, October 30, 2009.
• "In France, young people are seen as a category to be channeled," Le Monde, interview with Benoît Floc'h, July 8, 2009.
• Van de Velde, Cecile. Loneliness, a public health problem : an interview with Cécile Van de Velde. Radio Canada – Ici Première, program " Humankind », interviewed by Monic Néron, February 25, 2024.
• Deneault, Alain and Van de Velde, Cecile. Philosophical discussion on revolt. Radio Canada Première, program " The more the merrier », interviewed by Marie-Louise Arsenault, November 2, 2021.
• Arsenault, Marie-Louise . Cécile Van de Velde's prize list : 5 books on the clash of generations. Radio-Canada Première, program " The more the merrier », interviewed by Marie-Louise Arsenault, March 21, 2019.
• Van de Velde, Cecile. Questions for Cécile Van de Velde – Youth orientation. Economic and Social Council, Education, Culture and Communication Section, lecese.fr, September 19, 2017.
• Paugam, Serge and Van de Velde, Cecile. " On the principle of solidarity in our contemporary societies ". Politics, " The Course Interviews », Politika.io, March 17, 2017.