Se construire comme candidat à une Grande École quand on vit en banlieue populaire parisienne

This paper is focused on a single interaction in a high school, recorded shortly after the urban riots of November 2005, in an eastern suburb of the Paris area, during a training for the entrance examination of the Institut d’Études Politiques. The conclusion insists on the central contribution of ethnographic methods to a better understanding of social tension, and arises the question of the performativity of everyday teachers’ identity discourse in the framework of anti-discrimination policies.