My current research project takes part in the contemporary interrogations on populism. It considers this as a particular form of politicization, from the stand of what I term popular criticisms. In the project, I describe and analyze the proliferation of these criticisms within the activities of labor unions, in Europe and the United-States. From the standpoint of a pragmatic sociology, and in the wake of my PhD research on the personal "burdens" of public participation, I suggest a resumption of sociologies that cared about the popular but were limited in understanding it as a cultural distinction.
I explore the complex relations between popular criticisms and publicly legitimate criticisms, comprehending them in their material and collective context (through ethnography), considering with attention their constancies and variations (through international comparison) and their subjective grounds (through biographical interviews). This research dynamic also enables me to reconsider in an original manner the problem of "political competences" and its reverberations on personal "identity" construction.