Loic Wacquant Research Articles

Magali Bessone, about Loic Wacquant, « Race as Denegated Ethnicity », Why look for a unified concept of race?

Magali Bessone, about Loic Wacquant, « Race as Denegated Ethnicity », Why look for a unified concept of race?

The Scylla State. A gendered understanding of the experiences of marginalised women in the United Kingdom.

Since the formation of the 2012 Coalition government, the UK has been subject to 12 years of neoliberal policy enacted with ferocity and vigour. This has comprised austerity measures including the retrenchment of welfare via the reshaping of the welfare state and public services according to business practices, ideals of individual responsibilisation and overwhelmingly, the notion of reducing the state's ideological and fiscal responsibility for equity and social welfare. The neoliberal state has been conceptualised by Loic Wacquant as a Centaur, boasting a liberal head, yet one atop an authoritarian body whose focus isthe designated 'underclasses', the socially and economically non-compliant. The Centaur takes away with one hand while ruling punitively with the other, specifically via 'prisonfare' and 'workfare' to compel submission to precarious and sub-par employment. Although compelling, the Centaur State is justifiably critiqued for its blindness to gender and focus upon the manifestation of neoliberalism in the States. By exploring the stories of 23 women in the UK with histories of survival sex working and problematic drug use, a distinct gendered alternative reality emerges of the operation and machinations of the neoliberal state. Rather than a Centaur, marginalised women experience the Scylla State, a covert, hydra-headed beast motivated by neo-Victorian ideals of 'womanfare'. The operations of the Scylla State are unpredictable, replicate traumatising interpersonal experiences and variously involve surveillance, coercion, conditionality and the responsibilisation of victimhood to justify increasingly punitive responses to women's survival strategies in the face of increasing trauma and deprivation.

Communication, carcerality, and neoliberal stigma: the case of hunger and food assistance in the United States

ABSTRACT Drawing on three strains of critical theory – Foucauldian biopolitics, critical race theory, and the work of sociologist Loic Wacquant – I argue that neoliberal stigma is foundational to the design of the food (assistance) system. Neoliberal stigma is constituted in the discursive practices of shame, suspicion, and surveillance, which are communicative and carceral technologies used to discipline poor and racialized communities in their efforts to manage hunger and poverty. These communicative technologies are rooted in anti-poor, racist, and carceral logics and are deployed against Black and Brown bodies negatively impacting health and social wellbeing. Drawing on the voices of people with lived experiences of hunger, I demonstrate the mundane and exceptional ways in which shame, suspicion, and surveillance emerge in discursive practices surrounding food assistance and how these practices enjoin food assistance and carcerality into a ‘single organizational contraption.’ The analysis ends with three broad interventions required to disrupt neoliberal stigma amid racist violence.

Mídia, fake news e racismo:

O seguinte trabalho tem como objetivo investigar a relação existente entre a viralização de notícias falsas, amplamente conhecidas como fake news, e o racismo institucionalizado no Brasil. Percebemos, assim, como a construção da imagem do ‘bandido’ associado a pessoas negras relaciona-se com a destruição da memória do indivíduo, buscando legitimar a ação violenta para restabelecimento de uma suposta ‘ordem’. Entendemos que, para além da atuação punitivista existente na imprensa tradicional, existe a forma não oficial de mídia, atuante nas redes sociais, que, como expressão da ideologia dominante na sociedade, cria boatos para justificar excessos e violências contra negros no país de forma sistematizada. Recuperamos, assim, autores como Evgeni Pachukanis, Loic Wacquant e Marielle Franco para uma discussão sobre Direito Penal, Estado Penal e militarização de corpos e espaços periféricos. Apresentamos, ao final, alguns casos concretos que possibilitam perceber uma ação contínua, em mesmo modus operandi, para destruir a memória de corpos negros e periféricos vítimas de violência.

RECONSIDERANDO A TESE DA PENALIDADE NEOLIBERAL: INCLUSÃO SOCIAL E ENCARCERAMENTO EM MASSA NO BRASIL

Com base na teoria de Loïc Wacquant, o neoliberalismo tem sido a principal categoria explicativa relacionada à expansão do sistema penal e ao endurecimento das penas, notados a partir dos anos 1970, nos Estados Unidos, e da década seguinte, em diversos países na Europa. Embora inicialmente formulada para lidar com as transformações no sistema de justiça criminal estadunidense, a “penalidade neoliberal” é frequentemente incorporada ao discurso criminológico brasileiro na tentativa de compreender o encarceramento em massa no Brasil. No entanto, as transformações político-econômicas e sociais verificadas em um considerável período do século XXI no país sul-americano são aparentemente ignoradas na literatura criminológica nacional contemporânea. Não por outra razão, por meio de análise de dados secundários referentes à variação de indicadores socioeconômicos – como o IDH, o Índice de GINI e a taxa de desemprego – e do investimento público em distintos setores, o presente artigo identifica limitações para a “importação” da teoria da penalidade neoliberal enquanto teoria capaz de explicar integralmente a contínua expansão do sistema penal brasileiro em tempos de inclusão social.

Exploring Marginality among Filipino Catholics in Japan: A Proposed Heuristic Device

The Church seeks to be inclusive; one that opens her doors to everyone. For many Filipino Catholics (FCs) in Japan, their ecclesial existence is marked by a history of negotiation as “guests” hosted by the Japanese Catholics (JCs). Within this field of host–guest interplay, this paper explores the dynamics of sociospatial seclusion by employing the ideation of marginality proffered by Loic Wacquant’s study on urban ghettos. The paper argues that the guest-identity of FCs must not be understood as a unilateral action imposed upon by the dominant hosts against the former’s subjugated narrative as powerless victims. Instead, its maintenance is perpetuated by FCs’ elective and chosen ethnic clustering. In attempt to obtain better analytical clarity of this dynamics, this paper employs the functional value of the Cartesian plane as a mapping device in plotting historical events of interplay within a spatial field. The techne inherent in the Cartesian plane is embedded with the episteme of Wacquant’s ideation. Fused together, its utility as a heuristic device is herewith proposed. It is hoped that this theoretical construct can also be useful to any analysis of marginality contained within a host–guest interplay.

New Research on Housing and Territorial Stigma: Introduction to the Thematic Issue

This introduction to the thematic issue on housing and territorial stigma provides concise overviews of the concepts of stigma, housing stigma, and territorial (or neighborhood) stigma, while tracing back current research on these topics to the pioneering work of Erving Goffman and Loic Wacquant. In doing this, we place particular attention on social responses to, and coping strategies with, stigma, especially various forms of stigma resistance. Finally, in brief summaries of all articles in the thematic issue, we emphasize their shared themes and concerns.

Territorial Stigmatisation and Poor Housing at a London ‘Sink Estate’

This article offers a critical assessment of Loic Wacquant’s influential advanced marginality framework with reference to research undertaken on a London public/social housing estate. Following Wacquant, it has become the orthodoxy that one of the major vectors of advanced marginality is territorial stigmatisation and that this particularly affects social housing estates, for example via mass media deployment of the ‘sink estate’ label in the UK. This article is based upon a multi-method case study of the Aylesbury estate in south London—an archetypal stigmatised ‘sink estate.’ The article brings together three aspects of residents’ experiences of the Aylesbury estate: territorial stigmatisation and dissolution of place, both of which Wacquant focuses on, and housing conditions which he neglects. The article acknowledges the deprivation and various social problems the Aylesbury residents have faced. It argues, however, that rather than internalising the extensive and intensive media-fuelled territorial stigmatisation of their ‘notorious’ estate, as Wacquant’s analysis implies, residents have largely disregarded, rejected, or actively resisted the notion that they are living in an ‘estate from hell,’ while their sense of place belonging has not dissolved. By contrast, poor housing—in the form of heating breakdowns, leaks, infestation, inadequate repairs and maintenance—caused major distress and frustration and was a more important facet of their everyday lives than territorial stigmatisation. The article concludes by arguing that housing should be foregrounded, rather than neglected, in the analysis of the dynamics of urban advanced marginality.

Padrão territorial e crise do trabalho: o confinamento como forma de territorialização das relações sociais capitalistas contemporâneas

A partir de uma consideração de Michel Foucault sobre a prisão e a atualização de seus questionamentos por Loïc Wacquant em pleno século XXI, apresentamos uma interpretação crítica acerca do sentido do padrão territorial de confinamento no mundo contemporâneo que incluiria a prisão, mas a extrapolaria. Expondo de forma breve a presença de padrões territoriais de confinamento ao longo do processo de modernização, seja na plantation, na região, seja no processo de metropolização, buscamos localizar o sentido de cada uma dessas práticas a partir das sugestões de Loïc Wacquant sobre as instituições peculiares, todavia discutidas à luz dos desdobramentos contraditórios da reprodução ampliada do capital que, devido à revolução microeletrônica, engendra uma acumulação fictícia à medida que prescinde progressivamente das populações não proprietárias para sua acumulação. Tendo esse cenário como parâmetro, exploramos o ponto onde o exercício da mobilidade do trabalho se cruza com aquele da biopolítica, transformando esta última em necropolítica em virtude da descartabilidade dos trabalhadores e nos permitindo qualificar e diferenciar o padrão territorial de confinamento hoje com relação às práticas similares pregressas, no contexto contemporâneo de mobilidade total em crise, de colapso da modernização e de seu horizonte civilizatório. Ideias destacadas: artigo de reflexão sobre o padrão territorial do confinamento no mundo contemporâneo. Apresentamos padrões de confinamento anteriores, discutindo sua funcionalidade para a reprodução do capital. Interpretamos o padrão atual tomando-o justamente pela ruptura que estabelece com essa funcionalidade. Relacionamos sua constituição com a crise do trabalho e com a necrogestão populacional que dela emerge.

Kickboksen, een Marokkaanse route naar succes?

Loic Wacquant conducted ethnographic research in the ghetto of Chicago and describes the route to social mobility that black boxers try to follow as they train in the gym and build body capital. Based on similar research methods, this article compares the black boxers to two episodes of kickboxing in Amsterdam. Wacquant is not hopeful when it comes to social mobility of the boxers, as he sees their boxing careers as confirmation of their low position in society. In the first Dutch episode, kickboxers manage to combine body work in the gym with working in the nightlife economy. They make money but are unaware of the danger of getting involved in criminal activities, and a number of fighters end up in prison or even dead. Currently, kickboxing is very popular with young Moroccans. Having seen what went wrong in the previous episode, Moroccan trainers keep a close watch on their pupils, and make sure they realize that what happens outside and after kickboxing is what really matters.

'Re-thinking Squatter Houses with Wacquant; Social and Spatial Transformation in the Spaces of Hope

Özellikle ikinci dünya savaşı sonrasında neredeyse bütün dünyada yapısal, ekonomik ve politik değişimler neticesinde adı ve niteliği ülkeden ülkeye değişen, kentsel mekânın en alt hiyerarşisinde kalan mahalleler ortaya çıkmıştır. Türkiye’de gecekondular; bir dizi yapısal dönüşüm neticesinde sürecin zorunlu bir sonucu olarak kentlerdeki önlenemez yükselişini günümüze kadar taşımıştır. Bu çalışma, Loic Wacquant’ın araştırmalarıyla bağlantılı olarak “Gecekonduların” bir konumlandırmasını içermektedir. Çalışmanın amacı; kent yoksulluğunun oluşum süreçlerini ve temel dinamiklerini politik ve ekonomik dönüşümler ışığında anlamaya çalışmaktır. Bu doğrultuda yapılan araştırma ile; göçmenlerin kırdan kente göç süreci, umut mekânı olarak gecekonduların inşası, sınıfsal pozisyonları, göçmenlerin toplumsal, mekânsal ve kültürel dönüşümleri gecekondulular gözünden ele alınmıştır. Nitel araştırma tekniğinin kullanıldığı çalışmada, 30 kişi ile derinlemesine görüşmeler yapılmıştır. Veriler MAXQDA 11 programı aracılığı ile analiz edilmiştir. Elde edilen sonuçlara göre; tarihsel, toplumsal ve politik şartlara bağlı olarak kentin “marjinalleri” yoksulluk ortak paydasında buluşsa da ülkeden ülkeye önemli farklar göstermektedir. Türkiye’de gecekondular göçmen açısından kente tutunmanın mekânsal tezahürü olmuştur. Dayanışma ağları ve hemşerilik kente tutunmanın ilk adımı olan gecekonduların inşasında ve kentte var olabilmelerini sağlayan ekonomik girişimlerde en önemli etken olmuştur. Gecekondulular için apartmanlarda yaşama en önemli hedeftir. Kentsel dönüşüm süreçleri neticesinde hedeflerine ulaşan gecekondulular bir yandan kentin orta sınıfları haline gelirken bir yandan beklemedikleri ve arzu etmedikleri kültürel ve toplumsal sonuçlarla yüzleşmek durumunda kalmışlardır.

Penalidade e tolerância zero:

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo compreender, por meio do estudo de autores como Loïc Wacquant e Jock Young, a respeito da transição do Estado Social ao Estado Penal, como se deu a evolução da penalidade e da política de tolerância zero, e de que maneira esses fatores geram consequências na realidade brasileira. Pretende-se, assim, analisar as relações existentes entre política econômica, estrutura social e política criminal, para então verificar em que medida a política de tolerância zero foi importada dos Estados Unidos para o Brasil, de forma a produzir efeitos sobre os rumos da política criminal e refletir diretamente no sistema prisional brasileiro. O método utilizado é o dedutivo, mediante uma análise bibliográfica e de dados estatísticos.

Loic Wacquant: encarceramento em massa como política social na contemporaneidade

Over the last four decades, America has embarked on an unprecedented social and political experience. The replacement of a state of social welfare by a criminal state indicates that the criminalization of marginality and punitive containment of disinherited categories are confused with social policy: programs aimed at vulnerable populations have always been limited and isolated from the rest of the activities. In this way, the disciplinary vocation is affirmed mainly in the direction of the inferior classes and of the dominated ethnic categories. We will see through this article the conjuncture of Afro-American imprisonment according to Loic Wacquant.

Book Review: Patrisia Macias-Rojas, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America

Book Review: Patrisia Macias-Rojas, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America. New York: NYU Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-479-83118-0 (Paperback). 240 Pages. $28.00.[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2017 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]Patrisia Macias-Rojas' book, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America, provides rich insight into domestic border security in the Southern Arizona/Sonora region. With the escalation of immigration debates throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, the subsequent election of Donald Trump, and ongoing talk of building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, this is an especially timely and relevant book. It will therefore appeal both to lay audiences and to scholars working within a range of academic disciplines, including but not limited to American Studies, Criminology, Latina/o Studies, Political Science, Public Policy, and Sociology.Macias-Rojas is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology in 2007 from the University of California, Berkeley. She then spent seven years on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College before assuming her current position in 2015. MaciasRojas' background features previous work with the San Quentin Prison University Project and the American Bar Association in Chicago as well. She thanks several mentors and colleagues in her book's acknowledgments section, including high profile scholars such as Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo from the Racial Democracy, Crime & Justice network, Michael Burawoy, Loic Wacquant, John Hagan, Beth Richie, and Marjorie Zatz, among others. Her intellectual lineage is impressive, and it has prepared her well for undertaking publicly engaged scholarship.From Deportation to Prison is a heartfelt book. In her acknowledgments, Macias-Rojas shares a story about her long-time friend who was labeled as a gang member when he was a teenager. He was subsequently incarcerated for many of his teen and adult years, and he was then eventually deported around the time that she was completing her dissertation. Macias-Rojas had been corresponding with her friend for several years leading up to when this happened. She was clearly struck by this experience, which ultimately drove her to seek out a greater understanding of the crimmigration crisis that currently plagues the U.S.Within the book itself, Macias-Rojas strategically brings in her own experiences at times. She describes her work as an ethnography of migration enforcement in an Arizona/Sonora border town, and toward this end she recounts her own encounters with law enforcement while in the field. Her book is based on a decade of research that includes over 150 interviews, field work during the 2001-2005 period, archival work between 2007 and 2009, and additional field work in 2010. Among her interviewees were smugglers, NGO workers, and border patrol agents. She also visited migrant shelters 1-2 times each week (as well as several other sites) when she was in the field. Macias-Rojas' methodological approach and personal accounts ultimately humanize topics and groups of people that are more typically politicized, sensationalized, and misunderstood.From Deportation to Prison focuses on changes in domestic border security since the 1990s and new forms of criminalization that have resulted from these changes. Macias-Rojas notes that unauthorized migration into the U.S. was regarded as a civil offense for most of the twentieth century. It is only in more recent years that it has come to be considered a criminal act. She offers the intriguing observation that ports of entry were originally set up to facilitate cross cultural sharing and international commerce and were hence less centered on security when compared to today's border check points. …

Praktyka i władza symboliczna u Bourdieu: spojrzenie z Berkeley

In 2014–2015, Aksu Akcaoglu was a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had come to work with Loic Wacquant on his research on “the conservative habitus” in contemporary Turkey (with the support of the TUBITAK Science Program). In this dialogue, he invites Wacquant to explicate the philosophy and pedagogy of his celebrated Berkeley seminar on Pierre Bourdieu. This provides an opportunity to revisit key conceptual nodes in Bourdieu’s work, to spotlight its antitheoreticist cast as well as the influences of Bachelard and Cassirer; to clarify the relationships between social space, field, and symbolic power; and to warn against the seductions of “speaking Bourdieuese.”

Wacquant, urban marginality, territorial stigmatization and social work

Loic Wacquant is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written extensively on issues related to urban poverty, race and the expansion of imprisonment. Wacquant is heavily influenced by the work of the late Pierre Bourdieu. Specifically, Wacquant employs Bourdieu's theoretical tools of analysis to provide a critique of contemporary neo-liberal social and penal policy. This article considers the potential applications of Wacquant’s scholarship to contemporary social work practice. For the purposes of this analysis, Wacquant’s work is divided into three broad areas: the analysis of neo-liberalism and precarious forms of employment, the development of the penal state and his critical approach to doxa. Bourdieu uses the term doxa to refer to those views or opinions that are taken for granted within any society. They thus create the limits of, or provide a strong framework for, political and policy debates. It is argued that Wacquant’s theorisation provides an explanation of the forces that have led to the concentration of areas of poverty in the midst of relative affluence. In addition to facing long-standing problems of high unemployment, poor housing and a lack of social amenities, these areas - the banlieues in France, housing projects in the USA and estates in England - are stigmatized in public and media discourse. Wacquant’s work can be used to challenge the development of a form of social work that places emphasis on bureaucratic managerialism. In addition, it should encourage social work as a profession to re-engage with criminal justice issues. Finally, the critical approach to doxa provides a model for social work to challenge the limitations of current debates.

Loic Wacquant Commentaries

Loic Wacquant Commentaries

Book Review: Fieldwork in Theology: Exploring the Social Context of God's Work in the World

Fieldwork in Theology: Exploring the Social Context of God's Work in the World. By Christian Scharen. The Church and Postmodern Culture. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2015. xviii + 117 pp. $19.99 (paper).What is fieldwork in theology? Fieldwork is both social scientific observational research and the aim of M.Div. placements, learning about how to be and to serve the church dwelling among its constituents. In this short book, Christian Scharen blends those two senses together, articulating methodology for localized, observational theological research.This book is introductory. It seeks to enable the church to make social commitments in new, more deliberate and humble way, rather than reacting perennially to the dominant culture's consumption habits or putatively retreating from the altogether. Scharen argues that social theory can help the church practice the (social) logic of incarnation. It offers tools for rigorous self-reflection, avoiding idealist illusions, and finding communion with the other in concrete ways. Social science can articulate aspects of congregational life which have become invisible, thereby articulating how the church and God are at work.As whole, this hook's methodology and invitation rest on the outwardlooking orientation of theology articulated in the first chapter. In this chapter, Scharen opposes his position on the relation between church and to that of Stanley Hauerwas, whom he characterizes as withdrawing a colony of heaven behind strengthened bulwark opposite the world. By contrast, Scharen argues for the church to awaken, to enact anarchic 'giving away' of itself in and for the sake of the world (p. 7). He grounds this response to the church's cultural displacement in our post-post-Christendom era in the theology of Rowan Williams. If there is to be no gap between the gospel and our common life, then driven an acknowledgment of its failings into greater openness to the other, the church must find itself pressing by virtue of its very life ... against the sources of division and fear to engage in radical communion with (p. 13). The practice of dispossession as theological practice opens the scholar to opportunities for being caught up in Jesus' own life through communion over which she exercises no independent power.At the core of subsequent chapters, Scharen introduces and discusses Pierre Bourdieu, his antecedents Gaston Bachelard and Maurice MerleauPonty, and his student Loic Wacquant. Scharen leads into each of the main chapters of the book, each covering one of the figures just named, through musical prelude. His reflections on songs John Legend and The Roots, Esperanza Spalding, Lauryn Hill, and others tie this book to his earlier Broken Hallelujahs (2011). …

Neighborhood stigma and the sporting lives of young people in public housing

This paper spotlights the sporting lives of young people who live in ‘Redcrest’, a public housing community in the Niagara region of Canada. We report on data culled from neighborhood-centric documents (municipal data, planning council reports, media coverage) and ethnographic fieldwork (interviews, community mapping, go-alongs) collected over eight months with 14 young people. This paper also offers a critique of Robert Sampson’s work on neighborhood effects and draws on the theoretical insights and urban scholarship of Henri Lefebvre, Loic Wacquant, and the work of postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon, who further understandings of racism as a spatial relation. At the center of this research are narratives that highlight that public housing projects, negative stigma notwithstanding, can be good places to live. The results highlight the various contradictions and tensions experienced by young people living in Redcrest, specifically their experiences with neighborhood stigma, racism and Islamophobia, and how this impacts their sporting lives.

Loic Wacquant, Marginality, ethnicity and penality in the neoliberal city: An analytic cartography

Loic Wacquant, Marginality, ethnicity and penality in the neoliberal city: An analytic cartography