Antoine Esnos

Bio

After completing a bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of Montpellier, I went on to study for a master’s degree in anthropology at Paris Descartes University. Building on my master’s dissertations, which I carried out with organisations on the Franco-British border (Calais, Grande-Synthe), in September 2025 I began a PhD in sociology under the supervision of David Guéranger (ENPC, LATTS) and Camille Gardesse (EUP, Lab’Urba).

Thesis title: ‘The crisis facing those providing support: Barriers and drivers of voluntary engagement with exiled people’.

At the intersection of the sociology of collective action, the sociology of work and social geography, I am studying the mechanisms and stages through which commitment shifts from short-term to long-term in voluntary organisations where burnout is common and staff turnover is high. This multi-site research, conducted in Paris, Calais and Briançon, brings together the individual trajectories of those involved (residential, family, professional, activist, etc.), the organisational characteristics of the organisations (degree of institutionalisation, division of labour, attention to volunteers’ wellbeing, etc.), local contexts (spatial dimensions of engagement, hostile or welcoming local politics, local network of voluntary organisations, etc.) and the national context (the state’s policies of inhospitality, the rise of xenophobia, restrictions on freedom of association, precarious labour market conditions, etc.) in order to determine the impact of these parameters on the fluctuations and stability of engagement with exiles.