Loïc Wacquant

Loïc Wacquant is a Sociologue French born in 1960 which exerts with the the United States.

Course

It carries out initially studies of industrial economy. After its meeting with Pierre Bourdieu, it is directed towards the Sociologie with the beginning of the year 1980. From 1985 to 1994, it is student at the department of sociology of the Université of Chicago, and member of the Society off Fellows with the Université Harvard of 1990 to 1993, before being recruited as professor with the the University of California to Berkeley. He is also member of the Center of European sociology (Collège de France - ÉHESS).

Since the years 1990, it carries out a reflection on the processes of criminalisation of misery, the hypercarceralisation and the urban marginality with the the United States in bond with the racial question. After a formation of ground in New Caledonia where already the study of the modes of domination ethnoraciale levelled, it continues this research under the crook of the sociologist black-American William Julius Wilson which directs the department of sociology then, and draws his materials in a long immersion within the disadvantaged district of Woodlawn which it will put in prospect with an investigation in French suburbs in the district for Courneuve.

Studying at the university, it carries out the ethnography of a room of boxing located then at the border of the campus of the University and South Side of Chicago, one of the largest black ghettos of the United States. Published under the title Body and heart. Ethnographic notebooks of an apprentice boxer (Agonic, 2000), this book makes known it outside the community of the researchers in social sciences. It presents to it a detailed study of the medium of boxing in and around Chicago, as well as a plea for a participative ethnography with more close of surveyed.

Loïc Wacquant was in addition made known general public by press articles (of which several in Le Monde Diplomatique). The little book the prisons of misery (Reasons To act, 1999) was a great success in France and was then translated in 10 languages.

Prolix author, Wacquant published a hundred of articles bound for the sociologists or a vaster public. He carried out a book of discussions with Pierre Bourdieu, in which this last clarifies research that he developed since the beginning of the years 1960 and returns on his concept-keys. Bourdieu also invites there, like says it the subtitle, with " an anthropology réflexive".

Theses and controversies

The attacks launched by Loic Wacquant against several of his/her colleagues were worth to him sharp counterparts on behalf of the latter. It is the case of its article Scrutinizing the Street. Morality and the Pitfalls off Urban Ethnography long article-symposium published in the American Newspaper off Sociology of May 2002. Being based on key work of three authors of American urban sociology (Elijah Anderson, Mitchell Duneier and Katherine Newman), Wacquant seeks to show there what it names the impensés common ones to the majority of the work undertaken in American urban sociology. Taking for object the texts of the authors (of which he in addition recognizes, as of the introduction, the quality of work), Wacquant seeks to show what he names them through commun runs of research on the city and the urban one in the United States. It reproaches the authors either of magnifier and moraliser their investigators, or to seek to excuse them when sociology must, for him, to be satisfied to explain. There also reproach them for remaining locked up in the opposition between the deserving poor and the poor not deserving, that in the American ideological landscape the preserving turning of the beginning of the year 1980 re-established. This text which takes for object the theoretical methods and executives (explicit or not) to which have recourse the authors wants to be a work of epistemology of social sciences. The authors denounced the attack and reproached Wacquant for having deformed the texts, truncated quotations until their making say the opposite of what they had written - and denounced what they regarded as “ideological skews” of his analysis, the moralizing reading of the factual data which contradict its theses and its absence of research on the fields on which carry the books which he criticized. The publication of the book On the street. Questions of urban ethnography (Reasons To act) is announced for 2007.

Recently, Wacquant published an increased version of the articles which it had drawn from its thesis of doctorate. Bet Urban. Ghetto, Suburbs, State , the discovery, 2006, are a comparison of “South Side” of Chicago and a district located in the northern suburbs of Paris it quoted of the Four Thousand of Courneuve. For Wacquant, beyond the similarities (stigmatized places and that one seeks to flee, unemployment rate much higher than the national average, weakness of opportunities) in fact the differences carry it between these two territories of " relegation urbaine" (forms and rate of criminality, presence of the public authorities, ethnic homogeneity, role of the informal economy). Combining the history with the data of surveys statistical and ethnographic, it describes the emergence of two different configurations and the mechanisms which are the cause (inter alia the central role that the public authorities in the crystallization of the two forms of urban marginality would play which are the French suburbs and the American ghetto. Historically dated work (the beginning of the year 1990), the author outlines there however at the end of the work an attempt at characterization of the modes of advanced marginality, concept intended to replace that of ghetto, according to him unsuitable to describe French realities.

Its courses of Sociologie touch with its research topics ( Comparative urban inequality and marginality , Race and the State , Carceral institutions , Sociological theory , Sociology off the body , etc). He is member of the editorial board of the review Actes of research in social sciences and cofounder of Ethnography , which promotes the investigations of ground.

One sees it at the sides of Pierre Bourdieu in documentary the sociology is a sport of combat or in Attention danger work .

Selective bibliography

Pierre Bourdieu with Loïc Wacquant, Answers. For a reflexive anthropology , Paris, Editions of the Threshold, 1992.
Acts of research in social sciences, n°124, September 1998, Of the Social state at the penal State , number coordinated by L. Wacquant.
Prisons of misery , Paris, Reasons To act, 1999.
Body and heart. Ethnographic notebooks of an apprentice boxer , Marseilles and Agonic Montreal, , Comeau and Nadeau, 2000.
To punish the poor. The new government of the social insecurity , Agonic Marseilles, , 2004. (Following a dissension with the editor, L. Wacquant does not mention this book in its official bibliography.)
Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: The Mystery off Ministry Cambridge, Polity Near, 2005.
Bet Urban. Ghetto, Suburbs, State. the Discovery, Paris, 2006.

Notes & references

Random links: