When French sociologist Loïc Wacquant signed up at a boxing gym in Chicago's South Side, he had never contemplated getting close to a ring, let alone climbing into it. Yet for three years he immersed himself among local fighters, amateur and professional alike. He learned the Sweet science of bruising, participating in all phases of the pugilist's strenuous preparation, from shadow-boxing drills to sparring to fighting in the Golden Gloves tournament. In this experimental ethnography of incandescent intensity, the scholar-turned-boxer fleshes out Pierre Bourdieu's signal concept of habitus, deepening our theoretical grasp of human practice. And he supplies a model for a "carnal sociology" capable of capturing "the taste and ache of action." 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. Arguably the best investigation of habitus in the field of sociology, Body and Soul continues to be a valuable resource for students and scholars of the social sciences.

Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, Expanded Anniversary Edition

Politics & Social Sciences

Wacquant, Loïc

Social Sciences

Oxford University Press

Shaking Up the City: Ignorance, Inequality, and the Urban Question

Shaking Up the City critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of theory and empirical evidence, Tom Slater "shakes up" mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion by turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. To this end, he explores the themes of data-driven innovation, urban resilience, gentrification, displacement and rent control, neighborhood effects, territorial stigmatization, and ethnoracial segregation. &nbsp; With important contributions to ongoing debates in sociology, geography, urban planning, and public policy, this book engages closely with struggles for land rights and housing justice to offer numerous insights for scholarship and political action to guard against the spread of an urbanism rooted in vested interest. &nbsp;

Slater, Tom

University of California Press

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.

Prisons of Poverty (Volume 23) (Contradictions of Modernity)

Univ. of Minnesota Press

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

Review\n“Loïc Wacquant's exploration of the rise and decline of the 'underclass' concept features extraordinary archival research. This important and unique book is destined to become a standard reference in studies ranging from the sociology of knowledge to urban poverty.” 
William Julius Wilson, author of The Truly Disadvantaged\n“In this thoroughly historicized account, Wacquant dissects the politics, panic, and obscurantism that accompanied the ‘underclass’ debate in the closing decades of the twentieth century – at the expense of the communities the concept purported to represent. It is an essential guide to a more ethical, genuinely reflexive sociology.” 
Alice O’Connor, author of Poverty Knowledge\n''The Invention of the 'Underclass' is a must-read for specialists and students of urban poverty, social policy, and social theory.'' 
Social Forces 
"there is much to enjoy and admire here. The investigation is focused, rich and detailed and the 
writing is robust and engaging.... the book is an excellent addition to scholarship in this area 
and will undoubtedly become an important reference point for future sociological 
work on the construction of undeserving and marginalised groups.'' 
Critical Social Policy "Wacquant has erected a critical yield sign that social scientists should heed but are likely to ignore. . . . if we are to learn anything from Wacquant’s must-read text, it should be that the line between use and abuse of a concept is perilously thin." 
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity\nAt 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.

Sociology

Polity

Review\n“Loïc Wacquant's exploration of the rise and decline of the 'underclass' concept features extraordinary archival research. This important and unique book is destined to become a standard reference in studies ranging from the sociology of knowledge to urban poverty.” 
William Julius Wilson, author of The Truly Disadvantaged\n“In this thoroughly historicized account, Wacquant dissects the politics, panic, and obscurantism that accompanied the ‘underclass’ debate in the closing decades of the twentieth century – at the expense of the communities the concept purported to represent. It is an essential guide to a more ethical, genuinely reflexive sociology.” 
Alice O’Connor, author of Poverty Knowledge\nAt 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.

Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory

Building on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the postindustrial metropolis, Loïc Wacquant offers a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist. He invites us to explore the city through what he calls the trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organize the world), social space (the distribution of capital in its different forms), and physical space (the built environment). On this reading, Bourdieu's topological sociology gives us the tools both to energize and also to challenge the canon of urban studies and to redraw their theoretical landscape. 
Compact and incisive, Bourdieu in the City will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, geography, urban studies, urban planning, architecture, and social theory.

Racial Domination

Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loïc Wacquant pours cold analytical water on this hot topic and infuses it with epistemological clarity, conceptual precision, and empirical breadth. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant first articulates a series of reframings, starting with dislodging the United States from its Archimedean position, in order to capture race-making as a form of symbolic violence. He then forges a set of novel concepts to rethink the nexus of racial classification and stratification: the continuum of ethnicity and race as disguised ethnicity, the diagonal of racialization and the pentad of ethnoracial domination, the checkerboard of violence and the dialectic of salience and consequentiality. This enables him to elaborate a meticulous critique of such fashionable notions as "structural racism" and "racial capitalism" that promise much but deliver little due to their semantic ambiguity and rhetorical malleability--notions that may even hamper the urgent fight against racial inequality. Wacquant turns to deploying this conceptual framework to dissect two formidable institutions of ethnoracial rule in America: Jim Crow and the prison. He draws on ethnographies and historiographies of white domination in the postbellum South to construct a robust analytical concept of Jim Crow as caste terrorism erected in the late 19th century. He unravels the deadly symbiosis between the black hyperghetto and the carceral archipelago that has coproduced and entrenched the material and symbolic marginality of the African-American precariat in the metropolis of the late 20th century. Wacquant concludes with reflections on the politics of knowledge and pointers on the vexed question of the relationship between social epistemology and racial justice. Both sharply focused and wide ranging, synthetic yet controversial,&nbsp;Racial Domination&nbsp;will be of interest to students and scholars of race and ethnicity, power and inequality, and epistemology and theory across the social sciences and humanities.

Mariant l’analyse sociologique et l’évocation littéraire, la rigueur de l’observation ethnographique et la ferveur de l’engagement charnel, ce livre invite à pénétrer dans l’univers quotidien des boxeurs de Chicago, contribuant à la sociologie du corps et à l’ethnologie de ce « négatif » vivant de l’Amérique qu’est le ghetto noir.Professeur à l’Université de Californie-Berkeley et chercheur au Centre de sociologie européenne, Loïc Wacquant est l’auteur de nombreux travaux sur l’inégalité urbaine, la domination raciale, la théorie sociologique et l’État pénal, dont Les Prisons de la misère(Raisons d’agir Éditions, 1999).« En août 1988, à la suite d’un concours de circonstances, je me suis inscrit dans un club de boxe d’un quartier du ghetto noir de Chicago. Je n’avais jamais pratiqué ce sport, ni même envisagé de le faire. Hormis les images stéréotypées que chacun peut s’en former à travers les médias, le cinéma ou la littérature, je n’avais eu aucun contact avec le monde pugilistique. Je me trouvais donc dans la situation du parfait novice. Trois ans durant, j’ai participé aux entraînements aux côtés des boxeurs du cru, amateurs et professionnels, à raison de trois à six séances par semaine. À ma propre surprise, je me suis pris au jeu, au point de passer mes après-midi au gym avant de passer entre les cordes disputer un combat officiel. Les notes consignées au jour le jour dans mon carnet de terrain (initialement pour m’aider à surmonter un profond sentiment de maladresse et de gêne physique, sans nul doute redoublé par le fait d’être le seul Blanc de la salle), ainsi que les observations, photos et enregistrements réalisés lors des tournois et “réunions” où se produisaient des membres de mon club ont fourni la matière des textes qu’on va lire. »

Corps & âme: Carnets ethnographiques d'un apprenti boxeur

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

AGONE

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wacquant, Loïc. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Wacquant, Loïc

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wacquant, Loïc. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, Expanded Anniversary Edition

Shaking Up the City: Ignorance, Inequality, and the Urban Question

Prisons of Poverty (Volume 23) (Contradictions of Modernity)

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

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

Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory

Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory

Racial Domination

Racial Domination

Corps & âme: Carnets ethnographiques d'un apprenti boxeur