By Loïc Wacquant. The Invention of the “Underclass”: A Study in the Politics of Knowledge (2022) is an exercise in epistemic reflexivity in the mold of Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Bourdieu. It charts the rise, metamorphoses, and fall of the racialized folk devil of the “underclass” in the long shadow of the ghetto riots of the 1960s. It draws out the implications of the strange career of this academic-journalistic-policy myth for the social epistemology of dispossessed and dishonored categories. It uses this case study to uncover the springs of “lemming effects,” “conceptual speculative bubbles” and “turnkey problematics” in social science. It elaborates a set of criteria for forging robust analytic concepts and applies them to the vexed notion of “race.” This argument is further extended in an article on Epistemic Bandwagons, Speculative Bubbles, and Turnkeys: Some Some lessons from the tale of the urban ‘underclass' (Thesis Eleven, 2023).
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Publication date:
February 7, 2022
Publication type:
Book