Loïc Wacquant is a sociologist whose work delves into urban poverty, racial inequality, and the body. He uniquely combines social theory with rigorous ethnographic research to illuminate the complex interplay between social structures and individual experience. Wacquant's research often emerges from in-depth fieldwork, seeking to reveal the underlying mechanisms that shape urban life and perpetuate systems of social control and disadvantage. His distinctive approach offers critical insights into the lived realities of marginalized communities.
Exploring the complexities of race in contemporary society, this book delves into its role in historical events and current issues like slavery and police brutality. Through extensive comparative and historical research, the author, Loïc Wacquant, provides a clear and precise analysis, challenging prevailing notions and offering a fresh perspective on this contentious topic. The work aims to bring clarity and depth to the often emotionally charged discussions surrounding race, making it a significant contribution to social science discourse.
Loïc Wacquant presents a fresh interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as an urban theorist, exploring the interplay of symbolic, social, and physical spaces in the postindustrial city. His work revitalizes urban studies, offering valuable insights for students and scholars across various disciplines, including sociology and geography.
At century's close, American social scientists, policy analysts, philanthropists and politicians became obsessed with a fearsome and mysterious new group said to be ravaging the ghetto: the urban “underclass.” Soon the scarecrow category and its demonic imagery were exported to the United Kingdom and continental Europe and agitated the international study of exclusion in the postindustrial metropolis. In this punchy book, Loïc Wacquant retraces the invention and metamorphoses of this racialized folk devil, from the structural conception of Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to the behavioral notion of Washington think-tank experts to the neo-ecological formulation of sociologist William Julius Wilson. He uncovers the springs of the sudden irruption, accelerated circulation, and abrupt evaporation of the “underclass” from public debate, and reflects on the implications for the social epistemology of urban marginality. What accounts for the “lemming effect” that drew a generation of scholars of race and poverty over a scientific cliff? What are the conditions for the formation and bursting of “conceptual speculative bubbles”? What is the role of think tanks, journalism, and politics in imposing “turnkey problematics” upon social researchers? What are the special quandaries posed by the naming of dispossessed and dishonored populations in scientific discourse and how can we reformulate the explosive question of “race” to avoid these troubles? Answering these questions constitutes an exacting exercise in epistemic reflexivity in the tradition of Bachelard, Canguilhem and Bourdieu, and it issues in a clarion call for social scientists to defend their intellectual autonomy against the encroachments of outside powers, be they state officials, the media, think tanks, or philanthropic organizations. Compact, meticulous and forcefully argued, this study in the politics of social science knowledge will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, urban studies, ethnic studies, geography, intellectual history, the philosophy of science and public policy
In this title, the author examines how penal policies emanating from the United States have spread thoughout the world. The author argues that the policies have their roots in a network of Reagan-era conservative think tanks, which used them as weapons in their crusade to dismantle the welfare state and, in effect, criminalise poverty.
A sociologist explains how over the past two decades neoliberal societies have
sought to control the poor through a combination of penal sanction and welfare
supervision.
Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional
research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago
and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality
is not everywhere the same.
Loïc Wacquant's Body and Soul melds Pierre Bourdieu's signal concept of habitus with Wacquant's ethnographic observations as an amateur boxer at a gym in Chicago's South Side. This updated edition features a new preface and postface that elaborate upon Bourdieu's theory of habitus, demonstrating the ways in which habitus anchors both the method and theory in the book and to provide a geneaology of the concept.
