This 2024 academic year marks the arrival of Mrs Sedayet Mayaci, who was awarded a full PhD scholarship through a competitive examination held last July. She now joins the Chair in Comparative Public Law and Politics.
The Chair welcomes its first PhD researcher
The Chair is delighted to welcome Sedayet Mayaci as of October 2024. She is an alumna of the Master’s in Public Law (International, European, and Comparative Law track) at Jean Monnet University Saint-Étienne. Top of her cohort, she also holds the Magistère Hautes carrières juridiques and, prior to that, a BTS in Fashion, Textile and Environmental Design (École supérieure de Design de Marseille).
Under the supervision of the Chair Holder, Professor Aurélien Antoine, Sedayet Mayaci will undertake a dissertation entitled Access to Nationality: A Comparative Study of France and the United Kingdom. She will also teach law at Jean Monnet University Law Faculty.
The Chair’s First Doctoral Research Project
Sedayet Mayaci’s PhD project builds on the work she began in her Master’s thesis (also supervised by Professor Aurélien Antoine) and fits squarely within the thematic and geographical scope of the Chair in Comparative Public Law and Politics.
By tackling the law of nationality, Sedayet Mayaci takes on a paradoxical subject. Although nationality is a fairly classical topic in both French and British public law, much remains to be done in terms of comparative analysis of the mechanisms governing access to nationality. Yet the issue is highly topical, as France and the United Kingdom now face similar challenges. These two liberal democracies are grappling with tensions surrounding the definition of national identity, the integration of immigrant populations, and the management of migration flows – against the backdrop of a complex colonial history whose effects remain visible today.
Sedayet Mayaci’s PhD project develops from this observation. She strives to provide a historical, political, and cultural analysis of the various factors that have shaped the development of nationality law in both France and the United Kingdom. In so doing, she aims to shed light, inter alia, on the criteria for access to nationality, the public debates they generate, and the reforms currently under consideration in both systems.
The study will start off by developing a historical and political account of the factors that have shaped the development of nationality law in France and the United Kingdom. It will then turn to a comparison of nationality law in both countries, examining the different avenues of acquisition and the conditions attached to nationality. The aim is to isolate both singularities and convergences, while also highlighting the implications that contemporary political debates have for public discussions and ongoing reforms in this area.
A multidisciplinary and ambitious research project
In line with the way the Chair in Comparative Public Law and Politics conceives comparative law, Sedayet Mayaci will draw on a methodological, conceptual, and epistemological framework that is both multifaceted and multidisciplinary – one that alone is capable of addressing an object as complex as nationality law. Drawing on legal sources and analysing them through the lenses of sociological, historical, and political data (gathered in France and during research stays in the United Kingdom), Sedayet Mayaci will be able to develop an ambitious PhD project that also reflects the critical tradition of CERCRID.
She will moreover benefit from the support of the entire team and of the Chair’s network – who are delighted indeed to welcome her !
