I joined the University of Glasgow as a Leverhulme postdoctoral researcher in September 2025 to work on my project titled ‘French and British ‘Left Behinds’: Race, Gender, and Class Identity’. Prior to joining Glasgow, I was a lecturer at the University of Warwick, teaching on political theory and international development (with a focus on race and gender), and completed my PhD in political theory at Queen Mary University of London with a thesis on anti-populism and the crisis of ‘liberal democracy’. I have also taught for 5 years at Queen Mary and King’s College London, and am an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.

My Leverhulme project focuses on the work that the category of the ‘white working class’ is doing, for whom, and what it takes to undo it. From a neo-marxist perspective, I’m researching how the working class has been both materially and discursively constructed through race and gender throughout the history of capitalism in France and Britain; how the ‘white working class’ can be such a mobilising force at various times in that history; and how to overcome these divisions and dismantle these structures (both as this has happened before, and as this can happen now or in the future).

In addition to a theoretical and historical contribution – a historical sociology of the ‘white working class’ through the framework of reproductive racial capitalism – the project carries an empirical dimension. I ask how working class people in Britain and France – across racial, gender and migration lines – experience, narrate and make sense of their exploitation under contemporary capitalism, and to what extent dominant racial, patriarchal, and nationalist framings structure or foreclose their understanding of their own structural positions. The fieldwork will take place in Glasgow and in the North of England for Britain; and in the North of France, and Saint-Denis for France; and will be accompanied by the production of a bilingual documentary to open and encourage further discussions on how exploitation, class and capitalism shape our everyday lives, but also on how we might challenge them.

This project is funded by a grant I was awarded from 2025 to 2028 from the Leverhulme Trust and the LKAS scheme at the University of Glasgow, and is mentored by Satnam Virdee. 

In previous work (PhD at Queen Mary University of London), I developed the concept of anti-populism as an analytical tool to understand some of the responses to the ongoing ‘crisis of liberal democracy’/ crisis of capitalism. I argued that during political crises like Brexit and the Gilets Jaunes, established governments don’t simply resist populism but actively reshape and exploit these crises to reassert neoliberal, nationalist, and authoritarian identities – a dynamic better understood through the lens of ‘anti-populism’ than populism alone. I worked within a post-structuralist framework, though critical of the later uses of that framework on the concept of populism. Instead, I reclaimed populism through a more historical and material grounding by revisiting Laclau’s 1977 work, repositioning it within its conjunctural and class dimensions and offering an alternative to current theoretical impasses. Through empirical work on the Gilets jaunes, I notably argued populism constitutes a symptom of repressed class struggles (Ietter 2025).  

You can find here a blog on and link to a podcast episode recorded at the end of 2024 at the University of Warwick on the subject of my previous work - populism and anti-populism, as part of the Politics and International Studies MA students-led podcast series. 

Aside from this, I am also undertaking short terms consultancy research work, such as annual reports on French politics for Freedom House. I also co-convene the French Politics Specialist Group of the PSA (Political Studies Association) in the UK, which my co-convenor Fraser McQueen (Leeds) and I have been shaping into a space to talk about race, islamophobia, reactionary politics, social movements and protests, Republicanism, colonialism in the context of French politics; and connect with scholars based in France on these issues. 

Current work

• Class (‘working class’ and ‘white working class’ in particular)
• Race, racism, and anti-racism
• Gender, feminism, and masculinity
• Racial capitalism
• Immigration
• Nationalism, and the state 
• Socialism and left politics
• Neoliberalism
• Marxism
• Historical sociology

Also based on my prior work:

• Populism (through emancipatory lens)
• Anti-populism
• Far right politics and their links to capitalism
• Post-structuralism

Research groups

• Sociology

Prior publications

PhD applicants are welcome to reach out to me for possible second supervision on subjects linked to my research interests (listed above).