Loïc Wacquant

Loïc Wacquant is a Professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Sociology, College of Social Science. His research spans ethnography, social theory, urban marginality, and racial domination with a focus on the penal state and neoliberal governance.

• Academic Contributions: Expanded Bourdieu's habitus theory through carnal sociology in Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2022) and Journey to the Land of Boxers (2022).
• Conceptual Innovations: Developed 'thick construction' methodology and critiqued 'ethnographism' in The Poverty of the Ethnography of Poverty (2023).
• Sociopolitical Analysis: Mapped the caste-terror framework of Jim Crow in Jim Crow: Caste Terrorism in America (2024) and Racial Domination (2024), deconstructing 'race' as denegated ethnicity.

Scientific Awards:

• Guggenheim Fellowship
• ASA Best Book Award for Body and Soul
• French Ministry of Defense Prix de la Recherche