Loïc Wacquant - Knowledge

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this population doubly marginalized on the basis of race and class, the state deployed its police and judicial apparatus. Today, America's Gargantuan carceral system holds under lock nearly one million black men. Imprisonment is generally regarded as a remedy for crime—everybody has the 'crime-and-punishment' schema in their heads. But in reality, rolling out the penal system serves primarily to deal with dispossessed and dishonored populations. The prison boom in America is the response that the state gave to the rise of the disorders caused by economic deregulation and by the collapse of the ghetto as an instrument of ethno-racial control.

42: 728:", a term he calls a "bastard neologism". He also explores, through an account of his own experiences as an apprentice boxer at Woodlawn Boys Club, the elaborate process by which the "bodily capital" of practitioners of the "Manly art" of boxing is formed and managed. The "Sweet science of bruising" requires an “extraordinarily efficient relation to the specific capital constituted of one’s physical resources", Wacquant records, for the "pugilist’s body is at once the 590:" that "ensnares a supernumerary population of younger black men, who either reject or are rejected by the deregulated low-wage labor market, in a never-ending circulus between the two institutions." In the wake of industrial divestment, and in contradistinction to the high twentieth-century "dark ghetto" that functioned as a "reservoir of cheap and pliable labor" for urban manufacturers, the 'hyperghetto', like the prison system, serves the " 631:

to 'four constituent elements': stigma, constraint, spatial confinement, and institutional parallelism." In his "A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure: A Sociological Specification of the Ghetto", the essay upon which Schwartz's epitome of his position is based, Wacquant contends that "ghettoization... is a highly peculiar form of urbanization warped by asymmetric relations of power between ethnoracial groupings: a special form of

724:—a "gym frequented exclusively by black athletes" at the time of his enrolment—Wacquant dismisses the "false idea", which he alleges to have been "deeply rooted in the American sociology of the relations between racial division and urban marginality since the earliest works of the Chicago School", that the ghetto is a "disorganized" space "characterized by lack, want, and absence". Wacquant denounces popular mainstream conceptions of the " 665:... are territories of working-class demotion and decomposition", not, like ghettos stricto sensu à la Wacquant are, "ethnic containers dedicated to maintaining an outcast group in a relationship of seclusive subordination." Wacquant maintains that such areas are not "ghettos other than in a purely metaphorical sense, no matter how impoverished and how isolated their residents may be". 690:, Wacquant writes that "we must escape from the narrowly materialist vision of the political economy of punishment to capture the reverberating roles of the criminal justice system as cultural engine and fount of social demarcations, public norms, and moral emotions". Testifying to his interdisciplinary reach, and his sensitivity to the discursive dimensions of social existence, 452:'s Ian Cummins, a qualified probation officer with expertise in mental health, has noted that "Wacquant's work locates him firmly on the progressive Left of the political spectrum." Wacquant is a critic of both major American political parties: regarding them as "little more than labels to facilitate the raising of funds" to pay for election campaigns. Alongside dozens of other 716:", Wacquant attempts to demonstrate the "fruitfulness" of an approach to sociology that takes seriously the "fact that the social agent is before anything else a being of flesh, nerves, and senses... who partakes of the universe that makes him, and that he in turn contributes to making, with every fiber of his body and his heart." Via the results of long-term 271:, where he is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Law and Society, the Global Metropolitan Studies Program, the Institute of Governmental Studies, and the Center for Ethnographic Research. He is also a research associate at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP) in Paris and an organizer of the Ethnographic Café. 329:. A member of an "educated middle-class family", his father was a botanist and his mother a schoolteacher. As a teenager, "prodded" by his father, Wacquant worked summer jobs as an industrial painter, a car mechanic, a farmhand, and a construction worker. After high school in Montpellier, he received his education in 792:

to Bourdieu, the mentor". Pillar two is his development of Bourdieu's 'practice of theory', embodied in his "enactive ethnography" and "carnal sociology". Pillar three is his double-sided "political sociology": analysing the "effects of the political productions of population categories" and bringing

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The historian of the 'ghetto concept' Daniel B. Schwartz suggests that Wacquant "of all sociologists" has been the "most adamant about theorizing the institution from its origins to the present". Wacquant, Schwartz submits, "argues for a more race- than class-based conception" and "reduces the ghetto

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industrial metropolis. According to Wacquant, the ghetto and the prison are structurally and functionally akin, reinforcing each other, with governmental encouragement, to ensure and perpetuate the socioeconomic marginality and symbolic depreciation of the black subproletariat. As Wacquant would have

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Providing a synoptic overview of Wacquant's body of work, which they assert to be "rich, far-reaching, and much debated", the Danish-based scholars Kristian Nagel Delica and Christian Sandbjerg Hansen conceive of it as being supported and pervaded, in all its apparent multiplicity, by four prominent

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With the transition from an industrial to a service economy, the ghetto lost its function of economic extraction and its residents were pushed out of the sphere of wage work. The economy of the street replaced the labor market, and social and criminal insecurity diffused everywhere. Then, to manage

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For Wacquant, whereas the "dark ghetto of mid-century" was ethnoracially homogeneous but socially heterogeneous, and "held within itself a full complement of classes", the "hyperghetto is a novel sociospatial configuration, doubly segregated by race and class, devoid of economic function, and thus

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in 2003, Wacquant 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." Latterly, Wacquant has affirmed that the "nexus of race, class and space" in New Caledonia made it a "fabulous historical laboratory" and

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urbanist Tom Slater comments that Wacquant's "most important contribution to urban studies is his demonstration that ignorance of the role of symbolic structures in the production of marginality in the city"—in short, ignorance of the phenomenon of 'territorial stigmatization'—"means that

538:-like" sociospatial inequalities that he later encountered in Illinois. Wacquant's intellectual trajectory and interests are explicated and reflected upon in "The Body, the Ghetto and the Penal State" (2009) and "Carnal concepts in action: The diagonal sociology of Loïc Wacquant" (2023). 779:

and Peter, claimed that though Wacquant had produced a "well-nuanced portrait of a subculture of African American boxers in one American inner city", his "theoretical insight", evidenced throughout the work, was no deeper than that exhibited by other ethnographers and sociologists.

377:, where he received his PhD in sociology in 1994. Wacquant has called Wilson the "foremost expert on the nexus of race and class in the United States" and Wilson has called Wacquant a "supremely creative scholar". At Chicago, Wacquant took classes with multiple anthropologists: 618:

Caught in the deadly pincer formed by the deregulated labor market and the retrenching welfare state, poor blacks are captured by the penal state, which simultaneously perpetuates and justifies their marginalization by presenting it as the product of their personal failings.

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devoid of market utility". One of the most consequential effects of the "wedding of ghetto and prison into an extended carceral mesh", with its concomitant 'hyper-incarceration' of young African American men (during a period of flattening, and subsequently declining,

521:, and the development of punishment as an institution aimed at poor and stigmatized populations all feature in his work. His interest in these topics received impetus from his experiences as a functionary of the former French Office of Colonial Research (ORSTOM) in 508:

can make a "civic contribution of the first order" through the "methodical critique of the categories and topics which weave the fabric of the dominant discourse" and by revealing "possible alternative paths" or "points of bifurcation in the road of history."

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the tools of social science to bear upon current public debates. In a deliberate echo of Marx, Delica and Hansen write that the fourth pillar of Wacquant's sociology is the "ruthless criticism of everything existing" in academia and beyond.

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in the same move the social and sensual logic that informs boxing as a bodily craft in the contemporary black American ghetto." Along similar lines, in response to various interlocutors, Wacquant later announced that

639:'s use of the "word ghetto as a loose synonym for declining lower-class estates branded as such by journalists and by some of their residents". "Declining white neighborhoods in the deindustrializing cities of the 2480: 635:." On Wacquant's account, therefore, "not all dispossessed and dilapidated urban districts are ghettos". Wacquant warns against conceptual inflation and criticises his compatriot 839: 529:

during the period 1983–1985, and as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago during the second half of the 1980s. Commenting on what he found in Chicago in the

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of history." For Wacquant, the "novel organizational compound formed by the vestiges of the ghetto and the expanding carceral system" constitutes the fourth '

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as being like an "accelerated independent study course" and a "fabulous private tutorial for an apprentice sociologist." Wacquant also worked closely with

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Wacquant, Loïc (2013). "A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure: A Sociological Specification of the Ghetto". In Petersen, Hans-Christian (ed.).

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Banks, Russell; Wacquant, Loïc; Buschendorf, Christa (2008). "Casting America's Outcasts: A Dialogue between Russell Banks and Loïc Wacquant".

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between "societies with slaves" and "genuine slave societies", Wacquant concludes that lower-class African Americans now live in the "

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Delica, Kristian Nagel; Hansen, Christian Sandbjerg (2016). "Pillars in the works of Loïc Wacquant: Against a fragmented reception".

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wrote that it "qualifies as the first sociological classic of reflexive autoethnography." In a 2005 review, Douglas Hartmann of the

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in which ethnic patterns of criminal activity have not fundamentally changed), Wacquant notes, has been the revivification of

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Wacquant's research explores and links together diverse sociological themes. The human body, urban inequality, ghettoization,

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recurrent features or 'pillars'. Pillar one is "Wacquant's rootedness in a French sociology tradition traceable from Comte,

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than that provided by a reductively economistic Marxian approach (such as that, for example, apparently pursued by

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and walked home with him at their conclusion. Wacquant has described his walking and talking with Bourdieu through

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Wacquant, Loïc; Vandebroeck, Dieter (2003). "Carnal concepts in action: The diagonal sociology of Loïc Wacquant".

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class-segregated 'hyperghetto'—as a species of "ethnoracial prison". Taken together, these comprise part of a "

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praised it as a "dazzling ethnographic journey" and a "virtuoso performance". More critically, the Adlers,

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Wilson, William Julius (2014). "Marginality, ethnicity and penality: a response to Loïc Wacquant".

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Wacquant's research has been recognized with several awards. He was elected a Junior Fellow of the

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In the 2001 article "Deadly symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh", Wacquant offers a '

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Spaces of the Poor: Perspectives of Cultural Sciences on Urban Slum Areas and Their Inhabitants

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stripped of the communal institutions that used to provide succor to its inhabitants." See

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Edwards, Cliff (26 October 1990). "Sociologist takes a licking, but keeps on... studying".

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Frenchman, nicknamed “Busy Louie” and weighing in at 137 lb, suffered a decision loss in a

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D'Alessio, F. N. (31 December 2003). "Sociologist looks back on boxing years in Chicago".

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Wacquant, Loïc (January 2001). "Deadly symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh".

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Criminalisation and Advanced Marginality: Critically exploring the work of Loïc Wacquant

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Wacquant, Loïc (2007). "Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality".

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Criminalisation and Advanced Marginality: Critically exploring the work of Loïc Wacquant

399:, whom Wacquant has labelled a "flimflam artist", was one of his examiners at Nanterre. 2356: 2305: 2243: 1906: 1628: 1593: 1557: 1451: 1355: 997: 636: 569:' that "cleaves American society asunder": following, in temporal succession, slavery, 465: 457: 306: 963:"Marginality, ethnicity and penality in the neo-liberal city: an analytic cartography" 461: 2419: 2328: 2309: 2247: 2126: 2101: 2061: 2006: 1910: 1835: 1754: 1632: 1597: 1455: 1401: 1250: 1037: 1020: 1001: 951: 937: 920: 903: 889: 875: 850: 776: 600: 582:

it, the prison should be viewed as a "judicial ghetto" and the ghetto—especially the

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in southern France, where, at age four, he lived for a year in the birthhouse of

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Inspired by Bourdieu, Wacquant endeavours to provide a more nuanced analysis of

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Cummins, Ian (2015). "Reading Wacquant: social work and advanced marginality".

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of poverty rather than the expression of underlying problems to be addressed."

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Wacquant has published more than a hundred articles in journals of sociology,

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Wacquant, Loïc (2005). "Shadowboxing with Ethnographic Ghosts: A Rejoinder".

1839: 1758: 1624: 708: 657: 611: 570: 522: 497: 407: 386: 326: 257: 198: 1589: 1405: 720:, or "observant participation", in the Woodlawn Boys Club boxing gym on the 603:, the semiotic conflation of blackness with criminality, and the "return of 789: 673: 662: 583: 554: 489: 403: 2377:, 31 (2008); in English as "The Body, the Ghetto and the Penal State", in 2239: 2121:

Slater, Tom (2017). "Loïc Wacquant". In Koch, Regan; Latham, Alan (eds.).

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Academic staff of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

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for its "abandonment of working-class voters", the seeming duplicity of

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The Invention of the "Underclass": A Study in the Politics of Knowledge

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has declared that it is "perhaps the best yet sociology of the body".

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Collins, Randall (March 2013). "Ten Major Theory Books Since 2000".

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Wacquant, Loïc (April 2003). "Toward a dictatorship of the poor?".

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Wacquant, Loïc (2009). "The Body, the Ghetto and the Penal State".

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Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity

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Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity

826:"Penal 'common sense' comes to Europe – US exports zero tolerance" 389:. Wacquant has remarked that he was "negatively influenced by the 2351: 2261:

Adler, Patricia A.; Adler, Peter (2005). "Lost in Translation?".

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Urban outcasts: Color, class, and place in two advanced societies

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Expanded anniversary edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Wacquant is the only sociologist of note to have competed in the

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Urban outcasts: Color, class, and place in two advanced societies

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Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality

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in November 1980. Wacquant attended Bourdieu's lectures at the

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of his work—an offensive weapon and defensive shield—and the

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negative economic function of storage of a surplus population

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and sociology in France and the United States: attending the

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Banks; Wacquant; Buschendorf. "Casting America's Outcasts".

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Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of Neoliberal Penality.

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contest at Saint Andrew’s Gym in 1990. Wacquant received a

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amateur boxing tournament. The then 29-year-old 5-foot-8⁄

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The punitive regulation of poverty in the neoliberal age

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Deadly symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh"

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