The object of this research is to account for the uprising of ethnic categories in french society. Its specific purpose is to restitute the uses of these categories : under which circumstances and context are they called up in order to read various situations and organize human social interactions ?Such an object takes place within the general ethnicity question, centred on the categorical ascription and social interaction processes. The challenge is to know how are produced, labelled and crystallised the boundaries between "They" and "Us" and what are their effects on the behavior of people involved in the personal interactions where this dichotomy is relevant.In this work we focus on the link between the social acknowledgement of a « suburban problem » and an ethnic definition of the situations and events occuring in present-day France.Starting from a case study centred on a Nice neighbourhood, publicly labelled as a « problem-making » district, this research focuses on the way the ethnic categories emerge as description or identification attributes of people or events. Ethnic categories are examined within three different social experiences : as the result of a media production ; as an institutional management principle of suburban unrest ; as a routine element of everyday life.Evidently, all three aspects interfere up to a certain point, depending on the position occupied by the different social actors intervening in the field. Ethnicity constantly runs through all three fields and it's social meaning is reformulated by the various social actors. This bears witness of the ethnicisation process that french society undergoes.
