Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris. He is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and recipient of the 2008 Lewis Coser Award of the American Sociological Association. His work spans urban inequality, ethnoracial domination, the penal state, embodiment, and social theory and the politics of reason. He is a founder and past editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography and was a regular contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique for a decade. Wacquant's books have been translated in some dozen languages and include Body and Soul: Ethnographic Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2004), Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (2008), Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009), Prisons of Poverty (2009), and Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (forthcoming).