Project title
“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.
Project description
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.
Selected publications
- Lamont, Michèle. 2023. Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World. New York: One Signal, Simon and Schuster; London: Penguin.
- Lamont, Michèle, Graziella Moraes Silva, Jessica S. Welburn, Joshua Guetzkow, Nissim Mizrachi, Hanna Herzog, and Elisa Reis. 2016. Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Lamont, Michèle. 2000. The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and New York: Russell Sage Foundation