CRSC Books

Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer

Loïc Wacquant
2021

By Loïc Wacquant.When French sociologist Loïc Wacquant signed up at a boxing gym in a black neighborhood of Chicago's South Side, he had never contemplated getting close to a ring, let alone climbing into it. Yet for three years he immersed himself among local fighters, amateur and professional. He learned the Sweet science of bruising, participating in all phases of the pugilist's strenuous preparation, from shadow-boxing drills to sparring to fighting in the Golden Gloves tournament. In this experimental ethnography of incandescent intensity,...

The Invention of the 'Underclass': A Study in the Politics of Knowledge

Loïc Wacquant
2022

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...

Voyage au pays des boxeurs

Loïc Wacquant
2022

By Loïc Wacquant.How can you be a professional boxer? A sociologist initiated into the art of striking, "Busy" Louie takes us to the land of the pugilists of the Chicago hyperghetto to taste the flavor and pain of the action between the ropes. Far from journalistic and literary clichés, he makes us feel the thread of the nagging daily work in the gym, an island of order and morality in an ocean of destruction and danger; share the boxers' devotion to the catechism of "sacrifice", an ascetic code of life which regulates their relationship to the secular world...

Misère de l’ethnographie de la misère

Loïc Wacquant
2023

By Loïc Wacquant.Misère de l’ethnographie de la misère (The Poverty of the Ethnography of Poverty, published by Raisons d’agir Éditions, “Cours et travaux,” 2023) is a book of ethnographic epistemology, theory, and advocacy: a critique of ethnographic reason. It recapitulates the three ages of “urban ethnography” over a hundred years to extract its roots in a philosophy of knowledge and action characterized as “moral empiricism” that turns out to be profoundly anti-sociological. The book makes a plea for an enactive, structural...

Racial Domination

Loïc Wacquant
2024

By Loïc Wacquant. Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loïc Wacquant pours cold analytical water on this hot topic and infuses it with...

Jim Crow. Le terrorisme de caste en Amérique

Loïc Wacquant
2024

By Loïc Wacquant. We associate the notion of caste with Brahmanical India but, in the South of the United States between the 1890s and 1960s, blacks, descendants of slaves, were treated as a sub-caste, true “untouchables” in the country. cradle of democracy. Jim Crow is the name commonly given to the system of racial domination which held them in its ferocious grip and against which the Civil Rights Movement of Martin Luther King rose up. But what exactly did it consist of and how did it work?

Loïc Wacquant draws...

Japanese American Millennials: Rethinking Generation, Community, and Diversity

Michael Omi
Dana Y. Nakano
Jeffrey T. Yamashita
Lisa Hirai Tsuchitani
2019

By Michael Omi - Whereas most scholarship on Japanese Americans looks at historical case studies or the 1.5 generation assimilating, this pioneering anthology, Japanese American Millennials, captures the experiences, perspectives, and aspirations of Asian Americans born between 1980 and 2000. The editors and contributors present multiple perspectives on who Japanese Americans are, how they think about notions of community and culture, and how they engage and negotiate multiple social identities.

The essays by...

Men Educators of Color in U.S. Public Schools and Abroad

Ashley N. Woodson
Travis J. Bristol
2023

Edited by: Ashley N. Woodson, Travis J. Bristol

This book reflects the diversity and possibility of critical research in education, with an emphasis on the examination of the intersections of social identities for men teachers of color, and the relationship between social identity and struggles for political and professional agency. The authors address race and race inequality in education and provide a strong theoretical foundation for filling the empirical gap on men teachers of color by engaging in questions such as:

How do critical...

An Introduction to Language and Social Justice What Is, What Has Been, and What Could Be

Netta Avinerid
Patricia Baquedano-López
2024

By: Netta Avinerid and Patricia Baquedano-López

This innovative, interdisciplinary course textbook is designed to provide the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the intersections of language, inequality, and social justice in North America, using the applied linguistic anthropology (ALA) framework.

Written in accessible language and at a level equally legible for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, this text connects theory and practice by sketching out relevant historical background, introducing theoretical and conceptual...

Globalization and Civil Society in East Asia

Khatharya Um
Chiharu Takenaka
2022

Edited by: Khatharya Um and Chiharu Takenaka

This book critically examines the impact of globalization, changing power dynamics, migration, and evolving rights regimes on regional order, discourse of national governance, state and society relations, and the development of civil society in East Asia. Providing a textured, critical reading of East Asia as an economically, socially, and politically dynamic region, this book also presents the region as one shaped simultaneously by progressive as well as regressive pulls. Attentive to prevailing issues...