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Research Programme

Research Axes

The Chair focusses on the following axes

Going beyond a restrictive conception of the patient, our approach takes the relation to the ill person as the focal point of care. In a context where the path of care is shaped by organizations, it is important to apply a global understanding of persons, seen as environmentally situated and possessing their own variability. This personalizing medicine takes up the challenge of contingence, whereas medical knowledge had gained scientific legitimacy thanks to taxonomic thinking. The rise of chronic illnesses reinforces this need to complete medical interpretations by comprehending the relational experience of the subject of care.


We will provide a training space aimed at health professionals and coupled to a think tank taking the form of a “creator of high-value healthcare projects”.

We will study new areas and fields of inquiry (France, USA, China, Mexico), make use of the tools of philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, historians and economists, attempting to develop truly transdisciplinary methods. But, above all, we will re-centre our inquiries, starting by that question on which all others depend: the question of value.

To start from the values of care calls for a study of its efficiency, which may be measured by indicators, which must be elaborated and tested. It is also necessary to evaluate the way in which centredness may allow the patient to mobilize their own values throughout the care period, but also which of these values the organization may promote. Care must not be guided only by technical and economic interests, those favoured by so-called personalized medicine. If illness, through the damage it does to capabilities, prevents, constrains, or even alienates, then it becomes a challenge to consider the ill person as an autonomous individual.