This article re-examines the race-populism nexus. It asks: Does populist political construction of the figure of “the people” necessarily involve processes of racial othering? We answer this question by revisiting three emblematic cases of populism. Each historical case illustrates a basic type of identity formation that can have an i) exclusionary, ii) ambivalent or iii) positive impact on racial justice. The first case is Thatcherism, whose “authoritarian populism” feeds on and reinforces anti-Black racial prejudice. The second is Peronism, which has an ambivalent relationship with race that promises to shed important new light on this classic case of populism. The third case is that of the American Populists, whose pioneering experiments in interracial politics remain an enduring illustration of populism’s progressive potential. In each case, we focus on a key document from that political regime/movement: the Conservative Manifesto of 1979, the Peronist Constitution of 1949, and the Omaha Platform of 1892. The article concludes that populism, as a logic of action, acts as a catalyst that intensifies whatever specific content is mobilised – racist and anti-racist content alike.

In this paper, I review studies of urban integration as analyzed for two groups of mobile newcomers: those designated as “migrants”, that is, mostly marginalized cross-border movers from outside Europe, and mobile EU citizens in Western European cities. This critical and reflexive reading serves to highlight how academic knowledge production on the topic has (re-)produced an image of white urban Europe. While critics of the concept of immigrant integration have suggested that cities and neighborhoods are better sites in which to study migrant integration than the nation-state, the paper demonstrates that studies of urban integration tend to suffer from similar problems, including an ethnonationalist focus and an essentializing of (ethnic) groups. The comparison foregrounds how mobile EU citizens are implicitly thought of as white; their presence in the urban territory is rarely questioned and their practices rarely problematized. In contrast, those designated as migrants are researched with reference to integration, whereby integration means moving closer to white spaces. Thus, studies of the urban integration of migrants use an ethnic framing, while studies of mobile EU citizens focus on class and nationality. The paper thus illuminates how studies of urban integration rely on and reproduce an implicit assumption of whiteness as the norm, even in diverse urban spaces.

Rather than leading to the emergence of a problem, some processes contribute to limiting their scope and impeding agenda-setting. These “nonproblems” are situations that could have led to social mobilizations or public intervention but end up neither being publicized nor subject to strong policy. We use occupational health in France to illustrate these mechanisms. The social invisibility of work-related ill-health is linked to the joint contribution of two processes. Firstly, from the perspective of research on ignorance and undone science, scientific knowledge is under-developed compared to other public health issues. And even available knowledge is rarely used by policy-makers. Secondly, policies use underestimated numbers from the occupational diseases compensation system. This specific configuration of knowledge/ignorance and official counting plays a central role in the production of occupational health issues as a nonproblem. Their invisibility contributes to the production of inertia and public inaction that characterize public policy in this field.