Loïc Wacquant

By Sara L. Austin, EdD

Loïc Wacquant is a professor of sociology and research associate for the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D from the University of Chicago.

His primary research focus has been in jails in the United States and Brazil, and ghettos in the suburbs of Paris and South Chicago. It was during his time at the University of Chicago that he began his exploration of inequality and stigmatization in black neighborhoods. He examines the existence of a pipeline to prison that originates all too often in these neighborhoods, regarding the prison as a judicial ghetto and the ghetto as an extrajudicial prison, resulting in a ‘carceral continuum’.

A former member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and a MacArthur Prize Fellow, Wacquant is well published, with over 100 research works in print. He is a co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography. His next research project is a comparative historical sociology study of the mechanisms of racial domination, tentatively titled, Pecular Institutions, as well as a sequel to his first book on prizefighting, (Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, 2004). The sequel, to be titled, Passion of the Pugilist, examines the desires and motivations of fighters.

Academic Website

Professional Website

Featured in Top Influential Sociologists Today