Isabelle Bruno

In addition to a selection of publications that appeared between 2008 and 2024, the first volume briefly recounts the path taken since the defence of the PhD dissertation, presenting past contributions, work in progress and some of the avenues that it opens up. Overall, it traces a research process that has led me from the offices of Saint-Gobain in Paris-La Défense to those of the California State Coastal Conservancy in Oakland, from the Directorates-General of the European Commission to the warehouses of Xerox in upstate New York, from the statistical services of the French ministries to the seaside resorts of Pampelonne Bay in the Mediterranean. In each of these places, the research addressed the social relations of power and resistance, their materiality and productivity. From the power to rank to the power to exclude, from “statactivism” to “beach battles”, from the benchmark that creates competitive gaps to the fence that keeps people out, it examined how practices of quantification and processes of appropriation contribute to the production and control of social inequalities.

The second volume is an unpublished manuscript entitled When the sea is rising, who owns the beaches? The Martin's Beach case: a socio-historical investigation into the power of coastal appropriation and the resistance of "the unavailable" (1838-2024)

This monograph focuses on the case of private appropriation of Martin’s Beach, California, taking into account the “double nature” of this space as a living environment and a social invention, a valuable asset and a vulnerable biotope. Drawing on archives and court documents, interviews and observations, a press corpus and a questionnaire, it examines how and by whom shorelines have become “resources” torn between collective availability, economic valuation and ecological preservation. At a time when the physical scarcity of sandy beaches is intensifying social competition to occupy, consume or even own them exclusively, I explore the hypothesis of a global enclosure movement through the lens of a local conflict. The case study provides a contextual analysis of the unequal distribution—structured by the property-owning order—of opportunities to use the coastline and their viability. The story does not end there. From encroachment to withdrawal, it extends the movement of dispossession through the question of what can’t be “appropriated” and shifts the focus from access inequality to the socially differentiated conditions of a still tentative managed retreat from the coasts.