"Urban Outcasts": Loïc Wacquant, Wed, Oct 8, noon @ 554 Barrows

[Javier Arbona]

The Institute for the Study of Social Change, the Department of Ethnic
Studies, and the American Cultures Center present:
Youth Violence Prevention Book Colloquium:

Urban Outcasts:
A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality

Wednesday, Oct. 8

12:00-1:30 pm

554 Barrows Hall

Speakers:


Loïc Wacquant, Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the
Institute for Legal Research, Berkeley Law School, UC Berkeley

with Ananya Roy, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, International &
Area Studies and Associate Professor & Chair, Urban Studies Department
of City & Regional Planning, UC Berkeley, and

Cihan Z. Tugal, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, UC
Berkeley, as respondents





Abstract:



In Professor Wacquant's new book, he shows that the involution of
America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an
'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered
by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In
European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion'
does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the
decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass
unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of
populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to
'anti-ghettos'. Based on survey and historical data and participant
observation in a Chicago ghetto and a Paris banlieue, he asserts that
state structures and policies play a decisive role in the articulation
of class, race and place on both sides of the Atlantic. By specifying
the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by
relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this book offers
tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the
public debate over social inequality and citizenship.



Before attending this event, you are encouraged to read a short piece
entitled "Ghettos and Anti-Ghettos" that discusses some international
implications of the book (click here) and to read an article that
situates the book Urban Outcasts on the broader analytic map of the
research Prof. Wacquant has done on "The Body, the Ghetto, and the
Penal State" (in press with Qualitative Sociology) (click here). These
are uncorrected proofs, not be cited till final publication.

Books will be available for sale and signing at this event.

***

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of
California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie
européenne, Paris. His interests span incarnation, ethnoracial
domination, urban inequality, penalization, and social theory. A
MacArthur Prize Fellow and recipient of the Lewis Coser Award of the
American Sociological Association, his books include Body and Soul:
Notebooks of An Apprentice Boxer (2004), The Mystery of Ministry:
Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics (2005), Das Janusgesicht des
Ghettos (2006), Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced
Marginality (2008), and Punishing the Poor: The New Government of
Social Insecurity (in press). He is a co-founder and editor of the
interdisciplinary journal Ethnography.

Ananya Roy is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the Division of
International & Area Studies at the University of California at
Berkeley. She also serves as Curriculum Director of the Blum Center
for Developing Economies. Roy's home department is the Department of
City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley
where she teaches in the fields of comparative urban studies and
international development. In 2006, Roy was awarded the Distinguished
Teaching Award. She is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender
and the Politics of Poverty (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and
co-editor of Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the
Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America (Lexington Books, 2004).
Her current research project is entitled Poverty Experts: Truth and
Capital in the New Global Order of Development (Routledge, forthcoming
2008). The project has received several prestigious awards including
the Hellman Faculty Award and the Prytanean Faculty Award. Most
recently, the project received a research grant from the National
Science Foundation.

Cihan Tugal is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of
California, Berkeley. He has previously taught at Northwestern
University, University of Michigan, and Bosporus University. He works
on the interaction between religion and politics and its impact on the
use of urban space. His book Passive Revolution: Absorbing the
Islamic Challenge to Capitalism will be published by the Stanford
University Press in 2009. Tugal's forthcoming book is based on an
ethnography of a poor and conservative district in Istanbul. He has
taught in this district and participated in its religious and
political life. Tugal has also written extensively in Turkish. His
previous research was published in Economy and Society, the New Left
Review, the Sociological Quarterly, and edited volumes.

For more information contact Usree Bhattacharya at the Institute for
the Study of Social Change, (510) 642-0813; or email
ubhatt...@berkeley.edu .

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