Loïc Wacquant

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre de Sociologie européenne du Collège de France. Trained in Paris and Chicago, where he received his Ph.D in Sociology in 1994 after earlier graduate studies in industrial economics, his research deals with comparative urban inequality and marginality, racial domination, carceral institutions, violence and the body, and social theory. A past member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University and a MacArthur Prize Fellow, he has conducted fieldwork in the outer islands of New Caledonia and on the South Side of Chicago. He has also been a visiting professor in Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles and New York City.

Loïc Wacquant is the author of over one hundred scholarly articles published and translated in half-a-dozen languages. His books include An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (with Pierre Bourdieu), Les Prisons de la misère (translated in ten languages), Corps et âme. Carnets ethnographiques d’un apprenti boxeur (Agone, Comeau et Nadeau), Punir Os Pobres (Rio de Janeiro, Freitas Bastos Editora), Los condenados de la ciudad (Buenos Aires, Manantial), and the forthcoming In the Zone: Life in the Dark Ghetto at Century’s End. He is also completing an anthology of the works of Marcel Mauss, to be published by the University of Chicago Press under the title, Marcel Mauss on Ritual, Exchange, and Social Transformation. He is a regular contributor to Le Monde diplomatique and a founding member of the group of French academic activists "Raisons d’agir."