Loïc Wacquant
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Loïc Wacquant is a French sociologist, specializing in urban sociology, poverty, 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 and has won numerous grants including the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship.
Wacquant was a student of Bourdieu, and one of his most meaningful followers. Wacquant is a prolific writer, who has published more than a hundred articles. He is also co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography. His important research was conducted in jails and housing projects in the US and Brazil. He conducted extensive fieldwork in a boxing ring in Chicago, which earned him his fame. He has participated in the Chicago Golden Gloves boxing competition.
[edit] About his work
Wacquant, Loïc. "Deadly symbiosis: when ghetto and prison meet and mesh." Punishment and Society 3(1): 95-134.
Wacquant does not offer, as 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, the weaker half of Wacquant's analysis, as he does not provide enough ethnographic evidence, 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.
