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Master's Thesis Presentation · Socio-Anthropology · Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, 2025 (Originally delivered during thesis viva – adapted for portfolio display)

This text is a written adaptation of the presentation of my second Master's thesis in social anthropology, Becoming a Subject Through the Body. Through an autoethnographic investigation of Ashtanga yoga, the research explores how bodily practices can serve as sites of attentional discipline, self-transformation, and subtle resistance—especially within environments shaped by performance-driven norms and ideals of self-optimization.

Anchored in critical theory and embodied inquiry, the thesis examines how attention, agency, and subjectivity are shaped through repetitive, non-verbal practices. It brings together philosophical reflection (Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno) and ethnographic sensitivity to ask how individuals navigate normative structures while cultivating alternative ways of being—through gesture, rhythm, and fidelity to bodily experience.

The research offers a grounded account of how behavior and subjectivity emerge through friction, repetition, and situated engagement—dimensions often overlooked in abstract models of human behavior. By mobilizing qualitative, embodied, and reflexive methods, it invites renewed attention to the subtle dynamics that structure how we inhabit the world. These insights offer valuable contributions to the design and evaluation of systems—social, technical, or conceptual—that aim to engage with or model human experience.

Master's thesis · Socio-anthropology · Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, 2025 · Untranslated (French)

This thesis investigates how bodily practices and attention shape subjectivity — not as static identities, but as fragile and fluctuating configurations emerging through discipline, focus, and embodied negotiation. Centered on a long-term ethnographic engagement with Ashtanga yoga, it explores how repetition, silence, postural effort, and relational tension — as forms of embodied engagement — become sites where individuals experiment with presence, authority, resilience, and ethical agency.

Grounded in a philosophy of practices and a phenomenologically informed anthropology, the research develops an analytical framework that attends to affective rhythms, attentional fluctuations, and lived temporalities. It interrogates not only how norms are internalized, but also how they are felt, questioned, and sometimes withdrawn from — in the in-between spaces of exhaustion, hesitation, or aesthetic search.

The thesis articulates a critique of neoliberal and disciplinary imaginaries without reducing practitioners to passive subjects. Instead, it explores the body as a medium of self-formation and ethical experimentation — a dynamic interface where critique happens in movement, through gestures and silences rather than discourse alone.

Relevant to ongoing conversations in both critical theory and human-centered design, this work offers a grounded understanding of how attention, normativity, and agency are modulated in practice. It invites reflection on how we design systems — social, technical, or conceptual — that shape how people inhabit their time, bodies, and ethical horizons.

Translated academic paper · Philosophy Master's thesis excerpt · Presented in 2021

This paper explores the formation of the "we" as a relational and attentional phenomenon. Drawing from phenomenology, developmental psychology, and multispecies studies, it traces how subjectivity and intersubjectivity co-emerge through shared attention — from early infant-caregiver dynamics to interspecific configurations.

Bringing together the neurophenomenology of joint attention and Donna Haraway's concept of "companion species," the paper proposes an expanded, ethical model of relationality rooted in attentional discipline. At its core, it asks: how do we attune to others — human or not — and what emerges when we do?

Master's thesis · Socio-anthropology · Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, 2022 · Untranslated (French)

This thesis explores the garden as a site of shared life and generative tension, where ways of inhabiting, perceiving, and relating are continually composed and recomposed. Conducted through situated fieldwork and autoethnographic engagement in a personal garden, it examines how embodied practices of gardening shape modes of attention, temporal experience, agency, and ethical orientation.

Rather than treating the garden as a fixed object of knowledge, the research foregrounds the micro-dynamics of co-presence, improvisation, and relational emergence. It traces how rhythms are interrupted, gestures learned, and alignments formed through the contingencies of doing-with others –plants, soil, weather, and more-than-human beings such as birds, insects, and unseen organisms. It asks how one comes to care, to notice, and to become-with, not as stable roles, but as fragile, emergent alignments shaped in practice.

The thesis proposes that subjectivity in the garden is not pre-given but composed through friction, vulnerability, and attunement to more-than-human rhythms. Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari, Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, Vinciane Despret, Philippe Descola, and Isabelle Stengers, it contributes to contemporary debates on ecological subjectivation, the politics of attention, and the ethics of responsiveness in a damaged world. Its insights into how attention and relationality are shaped through embodied practice resonate beyond the garden, offering ways to rethink how we inhabit — and compose — our relations with complex systems.

Master's Thesis Presentation · Socio-Anthropology · Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, 2022 (Originally delivered during thesis viva – adapted for portfolio display)

This presentation distills the early stages of my second master's thesis in social anthropology, originally delivered during my viva. Building on my first thesis in philosophy, which explored time and the Anthropocene, this project takes a grounded turn: investigating a rewilded garden as a site for rethinking how humans and more-than-humans cohabit, relate, and generate time together.

Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, and Eduardo Kohn, I approach the garden not as object but as milieu — a living field of attention, care, and epistemological humility, where human and nonhuman lives become entangled.

Through year-long, multi-modal observation — combining writing, photography, and bodily engagement — I attend to interspecies relations and shifting modes of attention, exploring how temporalities and relational ethics emerge from shared inhabitation.

Moving across scales — from micro-encounters with plants and insects to broader reflections on rhythms and systems — this work experiments with forms of situated, embodied knowledge. It opens onto wider questions: how do we attend, how do we relate to other forms of agency, and how is time co-created in shared worlds?

Translated academic paper · Philosophy Master's thesis excerpt · Presented at Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté, 2021

In this paper, I explore the Anthropocene not just as a geological epoch, but as a temporal rupture — a widening gap between the rhythms of human society and those of the living world.

Blending philosophy, anthropology, and systems thinking, I trace a genealogy of social time through civilizational shifts — from the domestication of fire to the rise of industrial acceleration. Drawing on Tim Ingold's concept of the taskscape, I reflect on how our relationship to time shapes our environments, behaviors, and ways of being together.

This work proposes "ecosystemic time" as a lens to rethink the temporal frameworks we live by — and as a starting point for designing more coherent, attentive, and ethical systems.

Note: This paper was written during my Master's in philosophy and presented in 2021 at the philosophy department of Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté during a research colloquium.

Master's thesis · Philosophy · Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, 2022 · Untranslated (French)

This thesis investigates the Anthropocene not merely as an ecological condition but as a temporal rupture: a moment of disjunction between human and nonhuman rhythms, social norms and planetary limits, acceleration and finitude.

Adopting a philosophy of practices approach, it combines conceptual analysis and genealogical inquiry to examine how our constructions of time - from sacred to industrial to capitalist regimes - have shaped the current planetary crisis.

The first half unpacks the term Anthropocene, exploring its ambiguities, critiques (Capitalocene, Chthulucene), and its paradoxical temporalities. The second develops a critical genealogy of social time, drawing from sociology (Hubert, Elias, Bourdieu), philosophy (Ricoeur), and contemporary reflections on attention and acceleration (Citton, Rosa). It maps how temporal norms have become abstracted, internalized, and commodified, leading to forms of temporal alienation and ecological exhaustion.

Ultimately, the thesis argues for a reappropriation of time — through critique, narrative shifts, and the exploration of alternative orientations like ecosystemic time, rooted in the living. It opens space for ethical and existential responses to the Anthropocene grounded in attentional care, temporal justice, and collective imagination, with insights that resonate across disciplines concerned with time-sensitive systems, digital attention, and the ethical stakes of acceleration.

Master's Thesis Presentation · Philosophy · Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, 2022 (Originally delivered during thesis viva – adapted for portfolio display)

This text is a reflective presentation of the research I conducted for my Master's degree in philosophy. It traces the trajectory, questions, and theoretical stakes that structured my work over several years, at the intersection of ecological thought, social theory, and philosophy of time.

The project explores the articulation between the Anthropocene and social time—two major concepts in contemporary thought. Starting from the intuition that ecological crises are also crises of temporality, I investigated how dominant temporal regimes shape our attention, our affective availability, and our relationships with more-than-human beings.

Through a critical genealogy of time, drawing on authors such as Pierre Bourdieu, Hartmut Rosa, James C. Scott, and Donna Haraway, I interrogated the temporal structures that underpin our ways of living and narrating the world. At the heart of this work lies the concept of a time of the living: a relational, plural, and situated temporality emerging from the rhythms of human and more-than-human life.

Rooted in this research is a continuing inquiry into how perception, time, and meaning are mediated by the systems we inhabit—whether ecological, social, or technological. It opens a space for rethinking temporality as a relational and ethical dimension of our coexistence with the more-than-human.