Michèle Lamont will discuss her book Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How it Can Heal a Divided World, an ongoing collaborative research on whether and how American and British young workers in the two Manchesters are searching for recognition through politics; how indigenous people in Canada and Micronesia are seeking recognition through environmental justice and jobs; and the challenge of seeking recognition where it is impossible to obtain.
About the speaker:
Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. Born in 1957, she grew up in Quebec and studied political theory at the University of Ottawa before obtaining a doctorate in sociology at the University of Paris in 1983. After completing post-doctoral research at Stanford University, she has served on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin (1985-87), Princeton University (1987-2002) and Harvard University (2003-present). A cultural and comparative sociologist who studies inclusion and inequality, she has researched how we evaluate social worth across societies, the role of cultural processes in fostering inequality, symbolic and social boundaries, and the evaluation of knowledge, as well as topics such as dignity, stigma, racism, class cultures, collective well-being, social resilience, and social change