Wacquant was born and grew up in Montpellier in the Southern France, and he received his training in economics and sociology in France and the United States. He was a student and close collaborator of Pierre Bourdieu. He also worked closely with William Julius Wilson at the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in sociology in 1994. Wacquant has published more than a hundred articles in journals of sociology, anthropology, urban studies, social theory and philosophy. He is also co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography as well as a collaborator of Le Monde Diplomatique. His primary research has been conducted in the ghettos of South Chicago, in the Paris banlieue, and in jails of the United States and Brazil.
Research
Wacquant's work explores and links together diverse areas of research on the body, urban inequality, ghettoization, and the development of punishment as an institution aimed at poor and stigmatized populations. His interest in these topics stems from his experience in the black ghetto as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1980s. Commenting on this experience in The New York Times in 2003, he 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." His intellectual trajectory and interests are dissected in the article "The Body, the Ghetto, and the Penal State" In his work, "Deadly symbiosis: when ghetto and prison meet and mesh" in Punishment and Society 3, he offers a middle-range theory, relevant mainly to American racism against blacks in contemporary society. According to Wacquant, African-Americans now live "in the first prison society of history". The 'hyperghetto' constitutes the fourth stage in the development of 'peculiar institutions', following slavery, Jim Crow, and the early ghettos. According to him, the ghetto and the prison are for all practical purposes indistinguishable, reinforcing each other to ensure the exclusion of African-Americans from general society, with governmental encouragement. As Wacquant vividly characterizes it: the prison should be viewed as a judicial ghetto and the ghetto as an extrajudicial prison. Taken together, these constitute part of a 'carceral continuum'. To understand this concept, Wacquant argues for a single analytical frame unifying expansive 'prisonfare' and attenuating workfare, resulting in a deepening marginalisation and social and political subordination of stigmatized and defamed 'surplus' populations. Inspired by Bourdieu, Wacquant analyzes the structural constraints and consequences, but like Bourdieu endeavours to provide a more nuanced analysis than, for example, a reductionist Marxian economic analysis. The ghetto and the prison are now locked in a whirlpool, when it is no longer clear which is the egg and which is the chicken: the two look the same and have the same function. The life in the ghetto almost necessarily leads to more criminal behavior, yet Wacquant presents statistics that show that the distribution of crime between black and white has not changed. Instead he shows that a black, young, man is now "equated with 'probable cause' justifying the arrest". And in the prisons, a black culture is being reinforced by "professional" inmates, a culture which later affects the street. In his book Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, Wacquant denounces popular mainstream conceptions of the underclass and argues that the boxing gym is one of the many institutions that is contained within, and opposed to, the ghetto. He also explores, through an account of his own experiences as an apprentice boxer in a black ghetto of Chicago, the elaborate process by which the "body capital" of these athletes is formed and managed, and in doing so, building upon the work of his mentor Pierre Bourdieu, he argues for the development of a 'carnal sociology'.
