Loïc Wacquant is a French sociologist, specializing in urban sociology, urban poverty, racial inequality, the body, theory and ethnography.
Wacquant is currently a Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Medical Anthropology and the Center for Urban Ethnography, and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne in Paris. He has been a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, a MacArthur Prize Fellow, and has won numerous grants including the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship and the Lewis Coser Award of the American Sociological Society.
Wacquant was born and grew up in Southern France, and he received his training in economics and sociology in France and the United States. He was a student and close collaborator of Pierre Bourdieu, and one of his most meaningful followers. He also worked closely with William Julius Wilson at the University of Chicago, where he got his PhD in 1994. Wacquant is a prolific writer, who has published more than a hundred articles in journals of sociology, anthropology, urban studies, social theory and philosophy. His many books have been translated in a dozen languages. He is also co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography. His important research was conducted in the ghetto of Southside Chicago and the Paris banlieue, and in jails in the US and Brazil. He conducted extensive fieldwork in a boxing gym in Chicago, which earned him his fame. He has participated in the Chicago Golden Gloves boxing competition. He was also a collaborator of Le Monde Diplomatique for many years.
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Works
Wacquant's work explores and links together diverse areas of research on the body, urban inequality and ghettoization, and punishment as an institution aimed at poor and stigmatized populations. His intellectual trajectory and interests are dissected in the article "The Body, the Ghetto, and the Penal State" (2008).Qualitative Sociology. ([1]
In his work, "Deadly symbiosis: when ghetto and prison meet and mesh" in Punishment and Society 3(1) (pp 95-134), Wacquant does not offer, as Howard Winant asks of sociologists, a comprehensive race theory. Instead he offers a middle-range theory, relevant mainly to American racism against blacks in contemporary society. According to Wacquant, African-Americans now live "in the first prison society of history" (p. 121). This is the fourth stage in what is now path-dependent, after slavery, Jim Crow, and the early ghettos. According to him, the ghetto and the prison are now almost the same thing, reinforcing each other to assure the exclusion of African-Americans from the general society, with governmental encouragement.
The ghetto and the prison are now locked in a whirlpool, when it is no longer clear which is the egg and which is the chicken: the two look the same and have the same function (p. 115). The life in the ghetto almost necessarily leads to more criminal behavior, yet Wacquant presents statistics that show that the distribution of crime between black and white has not changed. Instead he shows that a black, young, man is now "equated with 'probable cause' justifying the arrest" (p. 117). And in the prisons, a black culture is being reinforced by "professional" inmates, a culture which later affects the street.
In his book Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, Wacquant denounces popular mainstream conceptions of the "underclass" and argues that the boxing gym is one of the many institutions that is contained within, and opposed to the ghetto. He also explores, through an account of his own experiences as an apprentice boxer in a black ghetto of Chicago, the elaborate process by which the "body capital" of these athletes is formed and managed, detailing in the imbrications of the traditional categories of "body" and "mind" in the social adquisition of a practice that is only explainable throgh the "practical sense" (in the notion of Bordieu) that conforms it
Works
- Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loïc (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- Wacquant, Loïc (1999) Penal ’common sense’ comes to Europe - US exports zero tolerance [2] April 1999 Le Monde Diplomatique. (original french version, ita version)
- Wacquant, Loïc (November 1999) Prisons of Poverty. Paris: Raisons d'agir.
- Wacquant, Loïc (2004) Body and Soul: Ethnographic Notebooks of An Apprentice-Boxer. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Wacquant, Loïc (2005) Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Wacquant, Loïc (2008) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Polity Press.
- Wacquant, Loïc (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.
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