Loïc J. D. Wacquant (; born 1960) is a sociologist and
social anthropologist
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In t ...
, specializing in
urban sociology
Urban sociology is the sociological study of life and human interaction in metropolitan areas. It is a normative discipline of sociology seeking to study the structures, environmental processes, changes and problems of an urban area and by doing ...
,
urban poverty
Poverty is the state of having few material possessions or little
racial inequality
Social inequality occurs when resources in a given society are distributed unevenly, typically through norms of allocation, that engender specific patterns along lines of socially defined categories of persons. It posses and creates gender c ...
,
the body The Body may refer to:
Literature
* ''The Body'' (short story), a short story by Camillo Boito
* ''The Body'' (novella), a novel written by Stephen King
* ''The Body'' (Sapir novel), a novel by Richard Sapir
* ''The Body'' (Kureishi novel), ...
,
social theory
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena.Seidman, S., 2016. Contested knowledge: Social theory today. John Wiley & Sons. A tool used by social scientists, social theories rela ...
and
ethnography
Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...
.
Wacquant is a Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Earl Warren Legal Institute,
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
, 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
The Society of Fellows is a group of scholars selected at the beginnings of their careers by Harvard University for their potential to advance academic wisdom, upon whom are bestowed distinctive opportunities to foster their individual and intell ...
Fletcher Foundation
The Fletcher Foundation was a nonprofit foundation that supported civil rights, education, and environmental education. The foundation supported efforts to develop a more just society with more equal opportunities for more of the population prima ...
Fellowship and the Lewis Coser Award of the
American Sociological Association
The American Sociological Association (ASA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology. Founded in December 1905 as the American Sociological Society at Johns Hopkins University by a group of fif ...
.
Career and education
Wacquant was born and grew up in
Montpellier
Montpellier (, , ; oc, Montpelhièr ) is a city in southern France near the Mediterranean Sea. One of the largest urban centres in the region of Occitania (administrative region), Occitania, Montpellier is the prefecture of the Departments of ...
in southern France, and he received his training in
economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and intera ...
and sociology in France and the United States. He was a student and close collaborator of
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu (; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence i ...
. He also worked closely with
William Julius Wilson
William Julius Wilson (born December 20, 1935) is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Harvard University and author of works on urban sociology, race and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th P ...
at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
, where he received his PhD in sociology in 1994. Wacquant has published more than a hundred articles in journals of sociology,
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi ...
,
urban studies
Urban studies is based on the study of the urban development of cities. This includes studying the history of city development from an architectural point of view, to the impact of urban design on community development efforts. The core theoretica ...
, social theory and
philosophy
Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...
. He is also co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal ''Ethnography'' as well as a collaborator of
Le Monde Diplomatique
''Le Monde diplomatique'' (meaning "The Diplomatic World" in French) is a French monthly newspaper offering analysis and opinion on politics, culture, and current affairs.
The publication is owned by Le Monde diplomatique SA, a subsidiary com ...
. His primary research has been conducted in the ghettos of South
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
, image_map =
, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
, in the
banlieues
In France, the term banlieue (; ) refers to a suburb of a large city. Banlieues are divided into autonomous administrative entities and do not constitute part of the city proper. For instance, 80% of the inhabitants of the Paris Metropolitan Are ...
of Paris, and in jails of the United States and
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
.
Research
Wacquant's work explores and links together diverse areas of research on the human body, urban inequality, ghettoization, and the development of punishment as an institution aimed at poor and stigmatized populations. His interest in these topics stems from his experience in the black ghetto as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1980s. Commenting on this experience in ''The New York Times'' in 2003, he said "I had never seen such scenes of desolation. I remember thinking: It's like Beirut. Or Dresden after the war. It was really a shock." His intellectual trajectory and interests are dissected in the article "The Body, the Ghetto, and the Penal State" (2008)
In his work, "Deadly symbiosis: when ghetto and prison meet and mesh" in '' Punishment and Society'' 3(1) (pp 95–134), 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). The 'hyperghetto' constitutes the fourth stage in the development of 'peculiar institutions', following (sequentially) slavery,
Jim Crow
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Other areas of the United States were affected by formal and informal policies of segregation as well, but many states outside the Sout ...
, and the early ghettos. According to him, the ghetto and the prison are for all practical purposes indistinguishable, reinforcing each other to ensure the exclusion of African-Americans from general society, with governmental encouragement. As Wacquant vividly characterizes it, the prison should be viewed as a "judicial ghetto" and the ghetto as an "extrajudicial prison". Taken together, these constitute part of a "carceral continuum". To understand this concept, Wacquant argues for a single analytical frame unifying expansive "prisonfare" and attenuating workfare, resulting in a deepening marginalisation and social and political subordination of stigmatized and defamed "surplus" populations. Inspired by
Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu (; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence i ...
, Wacquant analyzes the structural constraints and consequences, and, like Bourdieu, endeavours to provide a more nuanced analysis than, for example, a reductionist Marxian economic analysis (cf. Rusche and Kirchheimer's '' Punishment and Social Structure'', referenced by Wacquant in his ''Punishing the Poor'' (2009)).
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
The underclass is the segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class.
The general idea that a class system includes a population ''under'' the working class has ...
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, and in doing so, building upon the work of his mentor Pierre Bourdieu, he argues for the development of a 'carnal sociology'.
Le Monde Diplomatique
''Le Monde diplomatique'' (meaning "The Diplomatic World" in French) is a French monthly newspaper offering analysis and opinion on politics, culture, and current affairs.
The publication is owned by Le Monde diplomatique SA, a subsidiary com ...
. original french version
* Wacquant, Loïc (November 1999). ''Les Prisons de la misere''. Paris: Editions Raisons d'agir.
* Wacquant, Loïc (2001). Deadly symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh . Punishment & Society, 3(1): 95–133.
* 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''. Cambridge: Polity Press.
* Wacquant, Loïc (2009 ''Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity''. Durham: Duke University Press.
* Wacquant, Loïc (2009). Prisons of Poverty (expanded edition) '' Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
* Wacquant, Loïc (2009). ''Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of Neoliberal Penality.'' Cambridge: Polity Press.
*
* Wacquant, Loïc (2022). ''Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer.'' Expanded anniversary edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
* Wacquant, Loïc (2022). ''The Invention of the "Underclass": A Study in the Politics of Knowledge.'' Cambridge: Polity Press.
* Wacquant, Loïc (2022). ''Voyage au pays des boxeurs.'' Paris: Dominique Carre et La Decouverte.
* Wacquant, Loïc (2022). ''Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory.'' Cambridge: Polity Press.
Le Monde diplomatique
''Le Monde diplomatique'' (meaning "The Diplomatic World" in French) is a French monthly newspaper offering analysis and opinion on politics, culture, and current affairs.
The publication is owned by Le Monde diplomatique SA, a subsidiary com ...
The London School of Economics and Political Science
, mottoeng = To understand the causes of things
, established =
, type = Public research university
, endowment = £240.8 million (2021)
, budget = £391.1 millio ...