RESEARCH PAPERS

Quick Tour Of My Work

GENERAL: This article, written on the occasion of an international conference on “Ethnography and the Public Sphere” in Lisbon (June 2007), traces the main analytic and some biographical linkages between the main nodes of my work of the past two decades, centering on the connections between “The Body, the Ghetto, and the Penal State.”

“The Body, the Ghetto and the Penal State.” Qualitative Sociology 32-1 (March 2009): 101-129

[PDF – English]  [PDF – Español/Spanish] [PDF – Français/French]

URBAN MARGINALITY: GHETTO, HYPERGHETTO, ANTI-GHETTO: This short piece sums up some of the main arguments of Urban Outcasts and stresses the polar opposition between “Ghettos and Anti-Ghettos” as two types of neighborhoods of relegation in the US and Western Europe at century’s dawn.

“Ghettos and Anti-Ghettos: An Anatomy of the New Urban Poverty.” Thesis Eleven 94 (August 2008): 113-118. [PDF – English]

RETURN OF THE PRISON AND THE NEOLIBERAL LEVIATHAN: This extended essay, written in the form of a dialogue, draws out the core claims of Punishing the Poor and their implications for the contemporary penal scene in the United States and the European Union today.

“The Wedding of Workfare and Prisonfare Revisited.” Social Justice 38, 1-2 (Spring 2011): in press. [PDF – English]

INCARNATION: I am interested in developing a conception of action that heeds the “carnality” of human life (the fact that, prior to anything else, we are fleshly, sentient, and suffering beings, creatures of desire and drive) so as to capture the “taste and ache of action” that are consistently missed by the  two dominant models of conduct (Benthamite rational choice and the Kantian animal symbolicum). The concept of habitus as I understand it is intended to do just that: to help us develop a sociology not of the body (as socially constructed) but from the body (as socially constructing).

“Habitus as Topic and Tool: Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 8 (Spring 2011): 81-92. [PDF – English]