The paper develops a deep criticism of the dominant approaches to the study of urban poverty in the United States. According to the author, these approaches simplify the notion of ghetto to the extreme, thus turning this concept into the equivalent to pocket of poverty and divesting the term of historical specificity, heuristic potential and psychological value. The author advocates for the recovery of an institutional approach to the notion of ghetto and for the end to the exoticism built around this concept; thus, it is argued that the ghetto is the complex result of the articulation of a series of institutional agents and factors along with the operation of dominant political and economic structures. These agents and structures transcend the ghetto and reverberate throughout society rather than being the result of local particularities or the cultural essence of its dwellers. The paper aims to lay the foundations for further research.
Author Biography
Loïc J.D. Wacquant, University of California
Sociology Ph.D. Professor of Sociology, University of California at Berkeley. Researcher at the Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique, París.
Wacquant, L. J. (2013). Three pernicious premises in the study of the American ghetto. Revista INVI, 28(79), 165–187. Retrieved from https://tecnovet.uchile.cl/index.php/INVI/article/view/62609
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