Professor Peter Squires and Professor John Lea have recently co-edited a new book entitled Criminalisation and advanced marginality: critically exploring the work of Loïc Wacquant.
The book will be published later this year by The Policy Press.
Loïc Wacquant's writings have shaken the world of criminology – and social science more generally – to their very foundations with a wide-ranging critique of the neo-liberal government of crime and poverty, the shift from the 'welfare' to the 'workfare' and 'penal' states and of the predicament of 'advanced marginality' in late modernity. Not unlike the ways in which Foucault's writings re-energised the social sciences in the 1970s, Wacquant's analyses of the 'pornographic' discourses of law, order and security contaminating democratic politics on a global scale have become a necessary reference point for criminologists and social scientists engaged with the politics of criminalisation and penal policy.
Wacquant's work prompts a renewed reflection on the transformation of state authority, describing simultaneously the reorientation of state power, from welfare to discipline, and the creation of new social fault-lines and frontiers beyond which only a broken, selective or rather dysfunctional state authority persists. A renewal of such debates, accompanied now by concerns about our increasingly 'punitive' or 'disciplinary' social and penal policies, growing inequality, increasingly competitive individualism, and broader 'decivilising' tendencies in contemporary culture, take us to the heart of Wacquant's theses.
This original book is the first to review and draw on Wacquant's work. It presents a critical but constructive review and development of the challenging work of Loïc Wacquant, particularly focusing on the governance of crime and disorder; welfare, change inequality and diswelfare. It concludes with a chapter from Professor Wacquant responding to the authors' comments and critiques.
This is the first book to link to his work on the neo-liberal transformation of social policy and therefore fills an important gap in the existing literature which will be exciting reading for academics and students of criminology, social policy and social sciences more broadly.
