Converting ordinary resistance into collective action: Visibility struggles, discreet antiracist mobilisations and intermediation work in the French banlieues

Abstract

ABSTRACT Working-class neighbourhoods are often seen as political deserts, but can one identify discreet mobilisations that might prefigure broader movements? During fieldwork in poor urban areas in France, we observed different ways of opposing the everyday injustices of discrimination. These practices differ from the infrapolitics analysed by James Scott: the actors manifest forms of publicisation closer to what Asef Bayat calls ‘the art of presence’. The article starts out from an analysis of these non-organised practices and then examines the processes that enable feelings of injustice to be converted into more structured collective actions. Based on ethnographic studies in three working-class neighbourhoods in France over three years, the investigation highlights the conditions of emergence and publicisation of collective action by focusing on the role of intermediaries and re-placing discreet mobilisations in their institutional context of emergence.