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Paper short abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic appeared to unleash new forms of "medical populism" (Lasco, 2025). This paper analyzes the place of the body in populist politics through an ethnography of the Senegalese popular ecology movement Set/Setal.

Paper long abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic appeared to unleash a new wave of “medical populism” (Alibudbud 2023; Lasco 2025) characterized by hubristic claims about the efficacies of self-care, rooted in an individualized epistemology of ‘doing your own research’, tending towards the hardening and enforcement of national borders.

This paper seeks to reevaluate the place of the body and its politics in populist moments and movements, presenting an ethnography of the Senegalese popular ecology movement “Set/Setal”. “Set/Setal” is a singular historical event that took place in Dakar at the very end of the 1980s when the city “exploded”. For the duration of one intoxicating summer, young people began to publicly clean their neighbourhoods, at the same time calling for a new kind of common existence through the cleansing and renewal of social and political life. Set/Setal has lived on, however, both in the tradition in Dakar of embellishing the city to communicate with fellow citizens about bodies and environments, and as a and set of public practices that take protean forms and emerge at moments of pressure to reclaim and reorganize public space.

The paper argues that, in common with many populist movements, Set/Setal emerged as a response to ossifying, colonial and condescending forms of communication. The process of seizing the means of communication, however, involved grappling with local and concrete material relations and the problem of cleanliness. Paying attention to Set/Setal's history and ongoing mutations, I argue, has much to teach us about the basis and future trajectories of populist politics.