Talk Description: Four "peculiar institutions" have served to define and confine African Americans in U.S. society over the past four centuries: racialized slavery, the Jim Crow system of caste terrorism, the urban ghetto, and the hybrid formed by the concatenation of the hyperghetto and the carceral system. In this lecture, Professor Wacquant will discuss their similarities and differences and draw out the consequences of this historical model for the current scholarly and policy debates around race and citizenship.
Speaker Bio: Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris.
A MacArthur Prize Fellow, member of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and recipient of the 2008 Lewis Coser Award for theoretical agenda-setting from the American Sociological Association, his interests span comparative urban inequality, the penal state, ethnoracial domination, embodiment, social theory, and the politics of reason. His books are translated in twenty languages and include Body and Soul: Notebooks of An Apprentice Boxer (2004, new expanded edition 2017) and the trilogy Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (2008), Punishing the Poor: The New Government of Social Insecurity (2009), and Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (forthcoming). His most recent book is The Two Faces of the Ghetto (forthcoming with Polity Press).
