Michèle Lamont: Addressing Recognition Gaps: Destigmatization Processes and the Making of Inequality

Date: 

Monday, March 27, 2017, 12:00pm to 1:45pm

Location: 

Harvard Kennedy School: Allison Dining Room


Michèle Lamont, Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies, and Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Harvard University.

Michele LamontBuilding on her recent book Getting Respect: Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil and Israel and other studies, Michele Lamont compares recognition gaps experienced by 1) middle and working class blacks and other stigmatized groups in these three countries; and 2) white working-class men in the United States and France. She also describes destigmatization processes as they pertain to African Americans, people with HIV-AIDs, and the obese in the United States over the last decades. From these studies, she proposes an agenda for the systematic empirical analysis of recognition and other cultural processes as essential but largely missing dimensions to the study of inequality. 

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. She serves as the 108th President of the American Sociological Association in 2016-2017. She is also the recipient of the 2017 Erasmus prize for her contributions to the social sciences in Europe and the rest of the world.

A cultural and comparative sociologist, Lamont is the author of a dozen books and edited volumes and close to one hundred articles and chapters on a range of topics including culture and inequality, racism and stigma, academia and knowledge, social change and successful societies, and qualitative methods. She is currently working on a monograph titled Being Worthy.

Her most recent publications include the coauthored book Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel (Princeton University Press, 2016) and a special issue of Social Science & Medicine on “Mutuality, Health Promotion, and Collective Cultural Change.”

Lamont is Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University; and Co-director of the Successful Societies Program, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Learn more about Michèle Lamont's work
michelelamont.org

 

Registration Closed
See also: Spring 2017