Loic Wacquant is professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and is a researcher with the European Centre of Sociology and Political Science in Paris.

His research focuses on comparative urban marginality with a focus on Chicago?s 'hyper-ghetto' and Paris?s racialized urban periphery. Wacquant?s research also looks at broader issues of urban poverty, ethnoracial domination, the penal state, and social theory. He is the author of many books and articles, including Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality, Prisons of Poverty, and Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity.

On 1 November 2012, Loic Wacquant gave a public lecture organized by the University of British Columbia?s Liu Institute for Global Studies and the Department of Geography. His talk is entitled, ?The Production and Penalization of the Precariat in the Neoliberal Age.? This is the second podcast of a two-part series, focusing on the transformation of the ghetto and the emergence of workfare and prisonfare under neoliberalism.