{"title":"Books by Loic Wacquant","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780190465698","title":"Body \u0026 Soul","description":"When French sociologist Loïc Wacquant signed up at a boxing gym in a black neighborhood of 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. 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 expanded anniversary edition features a new preface and postface that take the reader behind the scenes and reveal the \"making of\" this classic ethnography. Wacquant reflects on his path to, and uses of, fieldwork based on apprenticeship. He traces the genealogy and draws the anatomy of habitus and explicates how he deployed it as method of inquiry. The postface retraces the trials and tribulations of his gym mates in and out of the gym over the past thirty years, and reflects on what they reveal about the economics of prizefighting, masculinity, and the passion that binds boxers to their craft.Body and Soul marries the analytic rigor of the sociologist with the stylistic grace of the novelist to offer a compelling portrait of a bodily craft and of life and labor in the black American ghetto at century's end. A subtle investigation and provocative extension of habitus, this expanded anniversary will intrige and excite students and scholars across the social sciences and the humanities.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56225290584437,"sku":"9780190465698","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780190465698_224d2a80-0149-4552-8d97-82140f277008.jpg?v=1786011550"},{"product_id":"9780822344223","title":"Punishing the Poor","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising \u003ci\u003ecriminal\u003c\/i\u003e insecurity but to the \u003ci\u003esocial \u003c\/i\u003einsecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures-the teenage “welfare mother,” the ghetto “street thug,” and the roaming “sex predator”-and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, \u003ci\u003ePunishing the Poor\u003c\/i\u003e shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of “small government” but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVisit the author’s website.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294935069045,"sku":"9780822344223","price":23.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780822344223_e023f6c4-b95e-4461-be05-77e7a0002346.jpg?v=1786015765"},{"product_id":"9780745610337","title":"An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology","description":"Over the last three decades, Pierre Bourdieu has produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory and research of the post war era. Yet, despite the his influence, no single introduction to his wide-ranging work is available. This book offers a systematic and accessible overview, providing interpretative keys to the internal logic of Bourdieu's work by explicating thematic and methodological principles underlying his work.  Firstly Loic Wacquant provides a clear and systematic account of the main themes of Bourdieu's work, outlining his conception of knowledge, his theory of practice and his distinctive methods of analysis. In the second part of the book Wacquant collaborates with Bourdieu to discuss the central concepts of Bourdieu's work, confront some criticisms and objections, and develop Bourdieu's views on the relations between sociology, philosophy, history and politics. Finally Bourdieu displays his sociological approach in practice: beginning with the practical demands of research, he moves, step by step, to a formulation of the principles of sociological reason.    Supplemented by an extensive and up-to-date bibliography, this book will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand Bourdieu's unique and outstanding contribution to contemporary social thought.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56296661418357,"sku":"9780745610337","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780745610337_cc770d78-ae12-4a6a-b3e3-70eab563f112.jpg?v=1786014499"},{"product_id":"9780745631257","title":"Urban Outcasts – A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality","description":"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. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'.  Comparing the US 'Black Belt' with the French 'Red Belt' demonstrates that state structures and policies play a decisive role in the articulation of class, race and place on both sides of the Atlantic. It also reveals the crystallization of a new regime of marginality fuelled by the fragmentation of wage labour, the retrenchment of the social state and the concentration of dispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collective idiom of identity and claims-making. These defamed districts are not just the residual 'sinkholes' of a bygone economic era, but also the incubators of the precarious proletariat emerging under neoliberal capitalism.     Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence and festering street violence resurging in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over social inequality and citizenship at century's dawn.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56296703426933,"sku":"9780745631257","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780745631257_77becf27-f875-4681-a7b9-8991c8b92dbe.jpg?v=1786014550"},{"product_id":"9781509563029","title":"Racial Domination","description":"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, Racial Domination 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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302564278645,"sku":"9781509563029","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509563029_ca68fa40-f829-458a-ae31-5d3d3578896b.jpg?v=1786022252"},{"product_id":"9781509573042","title":"Rethinking the Penal State","description":"In this book based on his 2024 Adorno Lectures, Loïc Wacquant combines social theory, comparative history and structural ethnography to probe criminal punishment as a core function of the state. Extending Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of bureaucratic field and symbolic power, he captures the constitutive duality of punishment, at once material and symbolic, an instrument of class control and a means of communicating values, endlessly oscillating between rehabilitation and retribution.   Ranging from the birth of the workhouse prison in sixteenth-century Europe to the deployment of punishment in the colonies to the workaday world of prosecutors in a California criminal court, Wacquant reveals how the penal state curates crime, manages urban marginality, signals sovereignty, and manufactures legitimacy in the eyes of the population by restoring control over bodies out of order. But the penal Leviathan is a bifurcated state which captures nearly exclusively dispossessed and dishonored categories by targeting their neighborhoods: it is everywhere a class-splitting and a race-forging institution based on the stubborn differentiation of \"paper penality\" and \"street penality.\"Getting inside the machinery of criminal justice shows that punishment must be placed at the epicenter of the political sociology of statecraft, group-making and place-making in the metropolis as well as brought to the forefront of civic debate to articulate a radical penal minimalism suited to reconciling punishment and democratic ideals.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56368946610549,"sku":"9781509573042","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509573042_50957645-61c6-4f86-a86e-a6c52fcd4d0e.jpg?v=1786022440"},{"product_id":"bourdieu-in-the-city-challenging-urban-theory","title":"Bourdieu in the City – Challenging Urban Theory","description":"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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57484346884469,"sku":"9781509556441","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509556441.jpg?v=1786266410"},{"product_id":"the-two-faces-of-the-ghetto","title":"The Two Faces of the Ghetto","description":"The \"ghetto\" has become a keyword of our age: a synonym for urban exclusion, poverty, and violence. It evokes images of dread and dissolution, it stokes the fear of racialized difference, and it conjures up the specter of internal secession. And yet the ghetto is none of these things, separately or in combination. Mating the philosophies of science of Max Weber and Georges Canguilhem, Wacquant draws on a comparative analysis of configurations of ethnicity, marginality, and power in the city across six centuries and five continents to forge a robust sociological concept of the ghetto as spatial instrument of ethnoracial closure and succor anchored by the mutual assignation of pariah population and tainted territory. He shows that, contrary to ordinary, policy and scholarly common sense, ghettoization is not coterminous with segregation and not a vector of disorganization but is, instead, a modality of bifurcated integration. At its peak, the ghetto is a powerful magnet and a protected life-space in which the confined category fashions a unified identity and accumulates the capitals that will enable it to challenge oppression. Spotlighting the paradoxical profits of ghettoization for the subordinate allows us to recover the \"horizontal\" dimension of solidarity, reciprocity and dignity that grows out of, and dialectically complements, the \"vertical\" dimension of subordination and denigration in any system of domination, thus paving the way for what Wacquant calls a diagonal sociology. An analytic concept of the ghetto as Janus-faced device, both cage and cocoon, for the seclusion of a stigmatized group offers a way out of the semantic morass and empirical confusion created by the shifting folk notions used among political and intellectual elites alike. It allows us to describe, differentiate, and explain the diverse spatial forms developed by tarnished populations as they come into the city without falling into the traps set by the rhetorical and metaphorical usages of \"the ghetto.\" It also gives us the means to grasp the structural and functional kinship between the ghetto, the prison, the reservation, and the camp just as the state managers of the advanced societies are increasingly resorting to defended borders, walls, and bounded districts as the means to define, confine, and control problem categories. Elegantly mixing theory and history, philosophical reflexivity and empirical comparison, The Two Faces of the Ghetto will be of interest to students of ethnicity, marginality, space, fear and power in the city across the social sciences and the humanities.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57682600919413,"sku":"9781509509249","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57680096985461,"sku":"9781509509232","price":60.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509509249_418a6b67-0ec7-458b-a9c1-04cfc9f7d84d.jpg?v=1792511523"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-loic-wacquant.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}