Loïc Wacquant

Loïc J. D. Wacquant (French: [lo'ik va'kɑ̃]; born 1960) is a French sociologist specializing in urban sociology, urban poverty, racial inequality, the body, social theory and ethnography.

Wacquant is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Law and Society, the Global Metropolitan Studies Program, the Institute of Governmental Studies, and the Center for Ethnographic Research. He is also a research associate at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP) in Paris and an organizer of the Ethnographic Café.

Wacquant's research has been recognized with several awards. He was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows for the term 1990–1993. In 1997, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2006, he was granted an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship. Wacquant won the Lewis A. Coser Award of the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association in 2009.

Wacquant is the only sociologist of note to have competed in the Chicago Golden Gloves amateur boxing tournament. The then 29-year-old 5-foot-8¹⁄₂ Frenchman, nicknamed "Busy Louie" and weighing in at 137 lbs, suffered a decision loss in a light-welterweight contest at Saint Andrew's Gym in 1990. Wacquant received a standing eight count in the first round.

Wacquant was born in Nîmes and grew up near Montpellier in southern France, where, at age four, he lived for a year in the birthhouse of Auguste Comte. A member of an "educated middle-class family", his father was a botanist and his mother a schoolteacher. As a teenager, "prodded" by his father, Wacquant worked summer jobs as an industrial painter, a car mechanic, a farmhand, and a construction worker. After high school in Montpellier, he received his education in economics and sociology in France and the United States: attending the École des hautes études commerciales de Paris (HEC Paris), the Université Paris Nanterre, Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, Washington, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wacquant was a student and close collaborator of Pierre Bourdieu, whom he met at a public lecture at the École polytechnique in November 1980. Wacquant attended Bourdieu's lectures at the Collège de France and walked home with him at their conclusion. Wacquant has described his walking and talking with Bourdieu through Paris as being like an "accelerated independent study course" and a "fabulous private tutorial for an apprentice sociologist." Wacquant also worked closely with William Julius Wilson at the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in sociology in 1994. Wacquant has called Wilson the "foremost expert on the nexus of race and class in the United States" and Wilson has called Wacquant a "supremely creative scholar". At Chicago, Wacquant took classes with multiple anthropologists: Marshall Sahlins and Bernard Cohn among them. One of his "course buddies" was David Graeber. Wacquant has remarked that he was "negatively influenced by the Chicago school of sociology" and "positively influenced by the power-and-symbolism-in-history mold of Chicago anthropology".

Jean Baudrillard, whom Wacquant has labelled a "flimflam artist", was one of his examiners at Nanterre.

Wacquant has published more than a hundred articles in journals of sociology, anthropology, urban studies, social theory and philosophy. He is a co-founder and former editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography and a contributor to Le Monde diplomatique and the New Left Review. His research has been conducted in the ghettos of Chicago, the banlieues of Paris, and the prisons of the United States and Brazil. In surveying the relevance of his oeuvre to social work, the University of Salford's Ian Cummins, a qualified probation officer with expertise in mental health, has noted that "Wacquant's work locates him firmly on the progressive Left of the political spectrum." Wacquant is a critic of both major American political parties: regarding them as "little more than labels to facilitate the raising of funds" to pay for election campaigns. Alongside dozens of other intellectuels, including Pierre Rosanvallon, Étienne Balibar, Jacques Bouveresse, and Pierre Macherey, Wacquant advocated a vote for Ségolène Royal, in preference to and against Jean-Marie Le Pen and Nicolas Sarkozy, in the first round of the 2007 French presidential election. Nevertheless, Wacquant, with the journalist Serge Halimi, has criticised the Socialist Party for its "abandonment of working-class voters", the seeming duplicity of Lionel Jospin, and its aping of New Labour. Though he has argued that sociologists "are not in the business of being either optimists or pessimists", Wacquant believes that the social sciences can make a "civic contribution of the first order" through the "methodical critique of the categories and topics which weave the fabric of the dominant discourse" and by revealing "possible alternative paths" or "points of bifurcation in the road of history."

Wacquant's research explores and links together diverse sociological themes. The human body, urban inequality, ghettoization, precarity, and the development of punishment as an institution aimed at poor and stigmatized populations all feature in his work. His interest in these topics received impetus from his experiences as a functionary of the former French Office of Colonial Research (ORSTOM) in New Caledonia, where he fulfilled his mandatory military service during the period 1983–1985, and as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago during the second half of the 1980s. Commenting on what he found in Chicago in the New York Times in 2003, Wacquant said "I had never seen such scenes of desolation. I remember thinking: It's like Beirut. Or Dresden after the war. It was really a shock." Latterly, Wacquant has affirmed that the "nexus of race, class and space" in New Caledonia made it a "fabulous historical laboratory" and prepared him well for the "apartheid-like" sociospatial inequalities that he later encountered in Illinois. Wacquant's intellectual trajectory and interests are explicated and reflected upon in "The Body, the Ghetto and the Penal State" (2009) and "Carnal concepts in action: The diagonal sociology of Loïc Wacquant" (2023).