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.

A deep understanding of the use of deliberative processes requires a political ethnography able to detect their consequences for the participants and for the public sphere. This article analyses a participatory process organised in France by an activist-professional facilitator with a small group of bureaucrats and marginalized individuals, designed to promote mutual understanding and raise public issues. This ethnography shows that deliberation in small groups, rather than merely producing consensus and reproducing inequalities in accessing forms of public expression as is sometimes alleged, may generate at least preliminary politicization and the publicization of social issues in working-class districts. These rather fragile effects raise the question of the continuity of collective action and institutional transformations generated by deliberative processes.