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François Dépelteau (1963–2018)

We are sorry to have to report the death of our friend and colleague François Dépelteau, of Laurentian University, Sudbury, Canada. François had suffered a recurrence of cancer, and died in Brazil on 3 August. We extend our sympathy to his widow, Tatiana Savoia Landini and their son Daniel, as well as to his daughters Marianne and Alexane with Aurélie Lacassagne – who is also well known in the circle of figurational sociologists.

Since 2016, François had been Editor of the Canadian Review of Sociology. With Tatiana he edited three books of contributions to the Elias sociological tradition: Norbert Elias and Social Theory (2013); Norbert Elias and Empirical Research (2014); and Norbert Elias and Violence (2017) – see Figurations 48. But besides Elias, in developing what he called his ‘transactional or deep relational sociology’, he also drew upon Blumer’s symbolic interactionism, Dewey’s pragmatism, Emirbayer’s relational manifesto and Latour’s actor network theory.

A fuller obituary will appear in Figurations 50, early in 2019.

Stephen Mennell