Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Michèle Lamont
Home institution
Harvard University
Country of origin (home institution)
United States
Discipline(s)
Cultural studies
Sociology
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies
Identity
Inequalities, inclusion & Social Innovation
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Michèle Lamont is a cultural sociologist who studies morality, group boundaries, and inequality. She has tackled topics such as dignity, respect, stigma, racism, and how we evaluate social worth across societies in Money, Morals and Manners, The Dignity of Working Men, How Professors Think, and the coauthored Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the US, Brazil and Israel. Her most recent book is Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World (Penguin/Simon & Schuster 2023). She is at work on a book tentatively titled “Recognition Globally.” The recipient of various awards, she served as President of the American Sociological Association in 2016 and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy, and the Royal Society of Canada.
Research Project
“Being Unseen:” Workers, Indigenous People and High Tech Experts in a Globalizing World
Research question: Being Unseen analyzes claims for political recognition by “invisible” US and UK working class youth; environmental recognition by two indigenous groups in Oceania and Canada; and recognition at work for high tech creators in videogames and other fields.
In this book project Michèle Lamont mobilizes comparative case studies to consider similarities and differences between three types of recognition: political recognition for the “invisible” working class youth in the US and the UK; environmental recognition for two indigenous groups in Micronesia and Eastern Canada; and recognition at work for high tech creators involved in the global production of videogames and special effects (VFX).
While the first study concerns the political dimension of misrecognition, the second and third address the human consequences of environmental racism and the global transformation of work through artificial intelligence and other technologies.
These studies all concern recognition in a different context of uncertainty about the future. They also concern groups that vary in terms of their “groupness” (the fluidity of their group identity and experienced symbolic boundaries) whether and how they voice claims about recognition, and whether and how they experience misrecognition.
For this research Lamont plans to draw on over 300 interviews and on a global multi-sited organizational ethnography.
Research Interests:
Cultural sociology; inequality; race and immigration; comparative sociology; the sociology of knowledge; contemporary sociological theory