Michele Lamont

Michele Lamont

Title: “Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How it Can Heal a Divided World.”

Abstract: Growing inequality and the decline of the American dream are marked by a mental health crisis across all social classes in the United States. I consider what alternative hopes are taking shape based on interviews with 80 Gen Zs and 185 agents of change who are producing new narratives in entertainment, comedy, advocacy, art, impact investing and other fields of activity. They are offering alternatives to neoliberal scripts of self by producing narratives that emphasize inclusion, authenticity and sustainability. They contribute to social movements that aim to extend recognition to the largest numbers, even in a context where political backlashes are multiplying. These transformations point to how to broaden cultural citizenship, not only in the United States but in other societies.

Bio: 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. Her books include Money, Morals and Manners: the Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class (1992), The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (2000), How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement (2009), Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the US, Brazil and Israel (co-authored, 2016), and Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World (2023). She is also the author of several collective works and over a hundred articles published in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Human Nature Behavior and other prominent outlets. She served as the 108th president of the American Sociological Association in 2016-17. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Society of Canada, and the British Academy. Honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Carnegie Fellowship, Leverhulme Fellowship, the 2014 Gutenberg Award, the 2017 Erasmus Prize, the 2024 Kohli Prize for Sociology and honorary doctorates from six countries.

Affiliation: Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies, and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University