International Sociology and International Sociology Reviews

‘Justice, Social Movements and Youth’ is our Topic of the Month for July 2025. On this topic, The article by Cécile Van de Velde (University of Montreal, Canada) published in International Sociology, ‘What have you done to our world?’: The rise of a global generational voice is Open Access. Read on to know more about the author’s trajectory and work.

Cécile Van de Velde

Why are you working on this topic? Could you share an experience, a fact or a person who made you get engaged in that research?

C. Van de Velde: The topic of young people’s anger imposed itself on me in 2012. At the time, I was conducting research on transitions to adulthood in the context of crisis, from a comparative European perspective. That same year, I witnessed the « Printemps érable » (Maple Spring) firsthand – a large-scale student movement that made history in Quebec.

I was immediately struck by the presence of slogans and themes I had already encountered in the European Indignados movements – such as education, intergenerational injustice, and democracy – even though the movements themselves were quite different. That led me to ask: are we witnessing the emergence of global generational anger?

This is when I decided to investigate youth movements across the decade – from the Indignados to climate protests, including pro-democracy uprisings in Hong Kong. Within each movement, I collected hundreds of slogans, in an effort to identify both shared rhetorics and local specificities.

This allowed me to analyze the rise of a rhetoric of generational injustice at a global scale – initially focused on social and economic issues, and gradually expanding, over the years, to include political and environmental dimensions.

What would you emphasize about your academic trajectory? Can you highlight which have been your academic positions, universities, awards, departments and research centers?

C. Van de Velde: After obtaining my PhD in sociology from Sciences Po Paris in 2004, I worked as a lecturer at the University of Lille (2005–2008), then at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2008–2015), where I held a chair on ages and generations. Since 2015, I have been a professor of sociology at the University of Montreal, where I lead the Canada Research Chair in Social Inequalities and Life Course. I was also an affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University in 2021 and 2022. Since 2023, I have served as Vice-President of Working Group 08 "Society and Emotions" within the International Sociological Association.

I have received several awards and distinctions, including the French National Order of Merit (2015), the Italia Prize (2014), the Red Cross Senior Research Prize (2013), and the Le Monde University Research Prize (2006).