Renowned sociologist Michèle Lamont (CASBS fellow, 2002-03) discusses her new book, Seeing Others, with former CASBS director Woody Powell. The book assembles decades of Lamont’s scholarship, engaging some of contemporary society’s most elemental challenges and advancing key building blocks toward a shared human experience marked by greater inclusion, belonging, dignity, empathy, and equality.
Renowned sociologist Michèle Lamont (CASBS fellow, 2002-03) discusses her new book, Seeing Others, with former CASBS director Woody Powell. The book assembles decades of Lamont’s scholarship, engaging some of contemporary society’s most elemental challenges and advancing key building blocks toward a shared human experience marked by greater inclusion, belonging, dignity, empathy, and equality.
MICHÈLE LAMONT:
Harvard University faculty page | Harvard sociology page
Personal website | Simon & Schuster page for Seeing Others
The Successful Societies project, which held its first convening at CASBS in 2003
WALTER "WOODY" POWELL
Stanford University faculty page | CASBS page
Personal website | PACS page
Announcement of Powell as CASBS director
CASBS summer institute on Organizations and Their Effectiveness (2016-present)
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
In the divisive, often undignified times in which we live, is there a key to greater understanding of our shared humanity, both in our day-to-day interactions with others and as a nation? How do we transcend group boundaries and hierarchies in order to facilitate the creation of a more inclusive, just, and equitable society? Such questions and variations of them are of course elemental and, as many listeners know, lie at the heart of a lot of research inquiries undertaken by people working under the CASBS umbrella.
Among the most eminent of them has been sociologist Michèle Lamont, a 2002 to 2003 CASBS Fellow. Today on Human Centered, Michèle Lamont discusses her new book, Seeing Others, a capstone of sorts that brings forth decades of scholarship in a form accessible to more public audiences. In Seeing Others, Lamont confronts those elemental challenges and offers essential building blocks for a more equitable society.
The operative word, as you'll hear, is recognition. Lamont is a professor of sociology, professor of African and African American studies, and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University.
She is one of the nation's most prominent cultural and comparative sociologists, having authored a dozen books, edited volumes, and more than a hundred articles and chapters on topics ranging from culture and inequality, race and stigma, and social change. She has served as president of the American Sociological Association, won the prestigious Erasmus Prize and Seawright Mills Awards, received six honorary doctorates, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the Royal Society of Canada.
Our interlocutor for today's episode is Woody Powell, a legend in the CASBS community. He's a two-time CASBS fellow, current faculty fellow, co-director of the Center's Summer Institute on Organizations and Their Effectiveness, and served as the center's interim director during the 2022-23 academic year. He is the Jaxx Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, with courtesy professorship appointments all over campus, from sociology to organizational behavior, to management science and engineering, and communication. He is also co-founder and faculty co-director of Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
His latest co-edited book published in 2020 is The Non-Profit Sector. In the field of organizational studies, he's known for seminal articles like Neither Market Nor Hierarchy, and co-authored The Iron Cage Revisited, the most cited article in the history of the American Sociological Review. Woody has received three honorary doctorates, and is an elected member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and the British Academy.
In this conversation, Powell draws out Lamont on the subtitle of her book, How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World. As you'll hear, in making her concept of recognition more universal, she discusses how we move from the neoliberal preoccupation of the self in terms of socioeconomic success and meritocracy to a more pluralistic sense of worth that is more egalitarian and emphasizes mutual respect, empathy, belonging, and inclusion. They'll discuss how we navigate tensions between living and expressing one's full self, while at the same time thinking outside one's self, how we arrive at a more multidimensional nuanced understanding of the structure of societal inequalities, how we confer dignity to others as we would with those whom we share kinship ties, how we foreground those we would otherwise relegate to the background of our lives, and how we fight misguided notions that tribalism is hardwired in us.
It's an ambitious conversation about an ambitious book. Let's listen.
Woody Powell: Hi, Michèle.
Michèle Lamont: Hi Woody! How are you?
Woody Powell: I’m good. It's really easy to see a through line from your previous work. I think most notably the dignity of working men and then also getting respect, but this is a very different kind of book. I'm curious what led you to write it at this point in time.
Michèle Lamont: Well, this is a trade book. I decided during the Trump era that it was important for sociologists to really be out there to help the general public readers to make sense of what was going on. If you remember early on in his presidency, Trump passed this travel ban against travel toward Muslim countries.
They were already, very early on, incidents limiting the rights of trans people. In sociology, we talk about recognition claims and social movements of groups that feel they have been marginalized, threatened, vilified, and they are making claim about their dignity. I was very interested in looking at the parallels between such groups from the left and the right, but also the ways in which the Trump presidency was aggravating, tensions around, you know, struggles around pecking order.
So the first goal was really to give people analytical tools to make sense of this using the tools of sociology. So I have close colleagues at Harvard, Steve Levitsky and Dan Ziblatt, that had published this book, who had published a book, How Democracy Dies, and I felt like their work was very important in helping people understand the threats to democracy, and I wanted to do something similar for sociology, not necessarily with the same level of ambition, but at least. So that's one factor.
I had also finished recently a term as president of the American Sociological Association, where I had to respond to many of Trump's positions, and also I had analyzed with some graduate students his presidential speeches, showing how he was vilifying Latinos, immigrants, Mexicans, as a way to prompt up the self-esteem of workers. So I was interested in analyzing these kinds of dynamics. And the last factor is I have Gen Z.
So one of the sources of data in this book are AD interviews with young adults as they are facing the challenges of thinking about dreams after several decades of growing inequality, when the American dream isn't delivering anymore. So what are they hoping for? How do they imagine a better life?
So these are kind of different strands that were pushing me in this direction.
Woody Powell: So many different streams. I wonder as you talk about the extent to which Trump tried to strip many groups of their dignity and recognition, was he creating recognition for groups of people, the MAGA crowd, that had never been recognized before? Is that fair to say?
Michèle Lamont: So this paper I just mentioned was very much about the ways in which he told workers, yes, you're downwardly mobile. You're being displaced from your rightful place in American society. It's not your fault.
It's the fault of globalization and it's the fault of immigrants. And you, we know that you're hardworking, you're good people, you're self-reliant, you're focused on helping your family. So he was just doing a lot of recognition work for them.
And one of the big challenges that we face now, a year before the 2024 presidential election, is figure out how the Democratic Party can hold on to enough workers, while at the same time giving recognition to groups that the workers feel don't deserve recognition. Trans people, for instance, who talk about pronouns in bathrooms and other issues that they might see as not essential or the issues that snowflakes are interested in. So that's one of the challenges that I think is very urgent that I'm interested in thinking about.
Woody Powell: Okay, so then how do we begin to make recognition more universal?
Michèle Lamont: Well, the last, the penultimate chapter of the book talks about how everyday citizens, you know, ordinary citizens can contribute. And I talk about the importance of moving from what I call the neoliberal scripts of self that has been promoted by, you know, this neoliberal economy of the last decades, which measures the value of people by socioeconomic success, competitiveness, self-reliance, you know, incarnated in some ways by Trump, all the virtues that Trump pretends to incarnate, and meritocracy as well to the extent that socioeconomic success is taken to be indicative of people's morality and their, you know, work ethic, while in fact we all know that meritocracy is greatly facilitated if you happen to have been born in the right zip code, in the right year as well. So in the context of growing inequality, I argue we need to move toward a society that has a more pluralistic understanding of worth.
And what companies are doing by recognizing that workers are not only workers but also caregivers. So extending family leave so that people can bring their mothers to the doctor or take care of their kids. You know, I talk about the ways in which organizations are putting in place structures to sustain more pluralistic understanding of who's worthy.
And I also talk about the importance of ordinary universalism, which is the basic idea that humans are humans. People are people. And there's a great deal that we all have in common.
So for a previous book, The Dignity of Working Men, I did a lot of interviews with North African immigrants in France. And I asked them, in what ways are you similar and different from French people? And many of these respondents were non-college educated.
And they would tell me, we all spend nine months in our mother's womb. We all have ten fingers. We all get up in the morning to buy our bread.
We're all children of God. We're all equally insignificant in the sky, in the cosmos. So really, evidence that to them seem totally matter of fact, that are drawn from their everyday experience.
And when I interviewed workers in Paris and New York, something very similar kept coming up, like treat people like people, emphasize what we all have in common. So when we interviewed Gen Z for this book, Seeing Others, that was also extremely central. Their desire, basically they don't believe anymore in the American dream, but they think that we can create a better society right now by treating each other in a more egalitarian, less hierarchical ways, which is why they are so upset at bosses that abuse workers, or the issue of older men going out with younger women.
The list is long of all the things that Gen Z find absolutely unacceptable, but what most of these things have in common is the essential inequality of power and disrespect of others, so that is also an important part of the argument.
Woody Powell: It's interesting at the American Sociological Association meetings this year, people's name tags just had their name, not their affiliation, and there was quite a kerfuffle around that among some older sociologists who felt like they had been stripped of their identity and remember being in the elevator with some younger scholars and asking them what they thought, and they certainly supported what you're saying, that it should just have our name, our pronoun, it shouldn't have our affiliation, our affiliation is a sign of hierarchies of power. So is that an example of ordinary universalism?
Michèle Lamont: It's the best example of all, especially the pronouns. I mean, like me, you've been in classrooms where as students start introducing themselves, some of them start by saying their pronouns. And it's really very clear acknowledgement of the fact that not everyone in the room should be presumed to be binary, you know, and this is you and I are boomers.
I mean, we know very well that this way of thinking about identification is very recent. It was certainly not part of the second wave feminism, right? So it's very interesting what being progressive has come to mean for that generation.
And I think the unisex bathroom and the pronouns look extremely large and many boomers don't understand why it is so important for that generation. And I feel we have no choice but to try to make sense of it if we want to be allies to this generation. They're not going away. We're going away.
Woody Powell: Well put. Well put. So when last week when President Biden did a drive by or a fly by in Michigan and for a brief period walked the picket line, and it was the first time ever for a US president, do you think that's an example of crossing symbolic boundaries?
Michèle Lamont: I love this example, Woody. And it was a paradoxical moment because he spoke to them by calling them not workers but middle class people. And I think it was symbolically extremely telling that he would define them primarily as middle class, i.e. taxpayers, i.e. people who are not sponges, people who contribute to American society. And that's also indicative of a real problem in American society.
Chapter 2 of the book shows the many ways in which many workers in the US have come to think of themselves as losers because the upper middle class, the college-educated professionals and managers that you and I, the group we belong to, have become such heroes in the media, eulogized, celebrated, that the non-college-educated have become widely, very widely, I think, invisible. And the fact that the working class now defines its identity as middle class is very telling. But I think to go even further, Biden needs to talk about them as workers and also denounce them in many ways in which they have become deeply stigmatized because that's connected, I think, to the opioid crisis, the debt by despair that the economist and case and Angus Deaton have written about, this feeling that they don't have any place and don't make a contribution to American society.
And with the pandemic, of course, we have this period of celebration of the essential workers, but it didn't last that long. And I think that the current moment, we know that just now, as the two of us speak, there's been a new renewal of unionization and of strikes with the Hollywood strikes and now the autoworkers strike. And what's very striking with these strikes is that a lot of it is about recognition.
Like the Starbucks strike was in part workers protesting the fact that the company was preventing them from putting rainbow flags or in the coffee shops or the Amazon strike was also about basic right to go to the restroom, which really stands very powerfully as a quest for human dignity against profit motive. And the Hollywood strike is also about the fact that the Hollywood studios are not distributing profit equally, as is the case for the United Workers automobile workers strike because since especially since the automobile company benefited from huge subsidies a few years ago, as they were rescued from bankruptcy once more. So I think behind and we know that Gen Z's and Millennials are extremely active, the sectors that are now unionizing rapidly are service sectors where you have a lot of Gen Z's and Millennials who want to create workplaces that are more equal and acknowledge people as full people, not just as service delivers or you know, so people want to be able to go to work with their full self, the team of living authentically in harmony with your full self where your life is not just after work, you know, that you should be able to express who you are in the workplace, to your life 24 hours a day is also extremely central to the way that they want to lead their life.
If they're not going to be stuck on the, what Gen Z's call the hedonistic treadmill of consumption, which is that you have the boring job, but you save money so you can have your house with the white picket fence. For most of them, this is a dream that is so out of touch and out of reach that they cannot wait. They don't know also with the crisis of the environment. They don't want to wait 30 years before getting what they want. They want to live authentically today. So that's a huge difference, I think.
Woody Powell: That's a dramatic transformation. I see a tension, though, between living your full self at work and 24 hours a day and developing a more collectivist orientation. And so how do you blend the two of having this expression that promotes a heterogeneity of ways of thinking and approaching the world, and at the same time, create a setting in which people think outside of themselves and their own expression and embrace the expressions of others?
Michèle Lamont: I think it's full of contradictions. Where I live in Boston, there are towns that have now deliberative democracy when it comes to creating the budget of small cities like Somerville. And this is very active.
I mean, this is an example where people of that generation really think about transforming politics at the local level because they think the federal level is totally out of reach. At the same time, they assert their dignity. They also want to create collectivity.
And they talk, you know, you've seen these T-shirts, be a kind human. So there's a lot of appeal to kindness. And my argument is some ways not, you know, let's all hold hands and kumbaya, you know, let's do meditation and mindfulness together.
Instead, it's like, let's engineer society. Let's create a society that has narratives that surrounds us that provide messages that are more inclusive. So this is why another part of the book is based on 185 interviews which change agents, which include 75 people who are creative workers in Hollywood, as well as stand-up comic. And I spent quite a bit of time describing the kind of narratives they create in their work, such as the show Transparent. I interviewed Joy Soloway, who is the creator of that show. And when I interviewed them on the show, what's behind it, they said, well, my goal is really to make people for whom the life of a trans woman is aberrant.
I want to help them understand what it's all about. So a lot of what these people do is really try to create narratives that humanize groups, that try to move perceptions beyond stereotypes. So the book is full of examples of people, such as Joy Soloway, who are really using their work to transform visions of reality.
So that's quite different than the perspective of, let's say, French republicanism, where they say, we'll pretend there's no racism in French society, so that we don't push people to live, balkanize in their little groups, by asserting that we're all French, and religious deference or ethno-racial and phenotype doesn't count in French society. It obviously counts a lot. So by not naming it reality, you don't make it disappear.
So I think that's partly what's happening in the US, where there's a growing embrace of our multi-cultural, you know, character of our society, at the same time as there's a lot of movement, counter-movement, right? Sociologists of social movement tell us this is always going hand in hand. So it's part of the dialectic that we have to live through.
Woody Powell: I'm interested, this may be an aside, but I think it's a wonderful example, the participatory budgeting process in Somerville. It used to be the case at the turn of the last century that most municipal budgets were done in that participatory process. And it wasn't until the early 19-teens that it got turned over to experts, because it was thought that common people just wouldn't bring enough expertise, they wouldn't bring the dispassionate side to it, and there was a way to make budgeting cleaner.
But you're giving an example of how the messy process actually reveals things about the selves and about the interest of people. And I'm curious about what are other settings, improv comedy is a fascinating one, but what are other settings where we can begin to recognize these collective interests?
Michèle Lamont: Well, in the same town of Somerville, there's also community gardens that are enormously popular. So these are examples of people turning toward having a much more agentic attitude toward creating the kind of society that they want to live in. And at the other level in the book, I also interview people who are deeply involved in advocacy, like Rashad Robinson, who heads the organization Color of Change that is active with trying to get prosecutors who are less punitive elected in the district where they are actually running for election as an anti-racist strategy, if you will.
And in the post Black Lives Matter moment, the law and how it is used toward criminal has become such a burning issue. So of these 185 people we've interviewed, there's people who are intervening in all sectors of society, and there's also people who are trying to create a more humane capitalism. So Heather Boucher, who serves on President Biden's Council of Economic Advisers, is part of the people who contribute to this.
Woody Powell: I'm curious, you're known to our audience as an imminent sociologist. You're also a mother. And one interesting insight of your book is that we should treat others as like our children. And so how do you think that through?
Michèle Lamont: Did I really say that?
Woody Powell: You don't quite say that, but you talk about how dignity can be given to others and that we shouldn't try to hoard privilege just to advance the family. And we should move away from a way of looking at the family as entirely centered of our kids getting ahead at the expense of others.
Michèle Lamont: Exactly. So we know post 2008 recession, you know, many middle class people lost their job and really freaked out about the possible downward mobility of their children, especially since many of these children were not with the program, you know, in terms of studying really, really hard and being best. And this mentality, then there were books published like Helicopter Parenting and Excellent Sheep and a lot on opportunity hoarding.
And, you know, we are now sitting in Palo Alto and I live in Brookline, Massachusetts. And in both places, these are communities where upper middle class people continue to really engage in this at the same time as there's huge criticism about meritocracy, upper middle class parents hiring, you know, tutors to get their kids to get higher, you know, scores in them. And we also have studies that demonstrate that class segregation has increased exponentially over the last few decades.
So we find ourselves in a situation where college educated people have less and less and less contact with people of other social classes, which means that they don't understand the challenges of living in poverty or just simply of not having a college degree. So again, the message is not about empathy. It's about, you know, having more shows that not only shows that ridicule and celebrate rich people like white lotus or succession or suits, but also shows that show the complexity of working class people.
So the film Roma is featured in the book in part because the Ford Foundation supported the film. It was made through an organization that they subsidized called Just Film. And it was done in connection with the National Alliance of Domestic Workers. And it portrays indigenous women who are working for middle class family in Mexico City and instead of them being in the background, the story is about them as one of them struggles with having to get an abortion. And it's a fantastic movie precisely because it puts in the foreground what's normally in the background. And there's another example.
Stephanie Lann wrote this book, Maids, which tells a similar story about the US about a young woman who's a single mother and she has mental health crisis and she works as a maid and she's invisible. So I think these kinds of films have very powerful impact on helping people like understand. It's not only being empathic.
It's really gaining an understanding of what's the lived reality of other people. So in some ways, understanding other people's lives is a solution. It's not like we need to have these three approaches to team buildings that business schools like. It's just learning to understand the lived reality of others, I think, is extremely important to our ability to change society.
Woody Powell: That answer is helpful to me in understanding the book has a good deal of attention on the media and on philanthropies. Was that something you thought you do going into the work for the book, or is that something you discovered in the process? And what do you see is their role in developing these new narratives?
Michèle Lamont: I was building on the previous book that you're familiar with, titled Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era, which came out of a collective research agenda involving a number of people from different disciplines that met for 19 years, three times a year. And one of this book, Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era, talks about the role of narratives in institution in fostering social resilience, which is not individual grit. It's about the capacity of society to meet challenges.
So I wanted to elaborate on this point of our collaboration by zooming on narratives. The book proposes the concept of recognition chains to talk about collaborations between people like the producers of Roma and philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation, which has been fighting inequality for a number of years. And it has four pillars to fight inequality.
And one of them is what it calls changing hearts and mind through narratives. So I wanted to show that this moment of emphasis on inclusion that we're going through now, it's not only the result of the diversity, equity and inclusion policies that organizations and human relations department are pushing, it's also something that is very actively promoted by a number of important philanthropies that are now focusing on narratives. 20 years ago, they were totally focusing on distribution of resources, you know, move to opportunity.
It was very driven through by the agenda set by economists, whereas now I think they have moved toward a much more multi-dimensional understanding of how inequality works and how changing narrative is crucial. So that's good news in the sense that it suggests that they are really moving toward a much more multi-dimensional understanding of how inequality works. And it's good news for people like me who are quality of sociologists, because it means that there's an acknowledgement that you need different kinds of tools to understand how inequality works. And we're complimentary with other disciplines such as economics.
Woody Powell: You also mentioned the Successful Societies Program, which ran for 19 years, which is maybe a record within the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Talk a bit about what made that a successful program and how, I mean, you didn't start out that program thinking narratives were crucial. I think you thought a bit about resilience, but the connection of narratives and resilience and the success of that program, I think everyone would be interested in hearing about.
Michèle Lamont: Yeah, well, the group was created in 2002. The historian Natalie Davis gave them my name because I'm Canadian, and they were in the process of putting together a team of people whose research would overlap around the topic of collective well-being. They had already decided the program would be called Successful Societies.
We were all a little horrified because we thought, no, that's too normative, but then we realized we're all interested in collective well-being. They supported us so that we would meet three times a year and to develop several projects together. The first one was very focused on health, so the impact of institutions and cultural repertoire as narrative on health was our focus.
What was wonderful with this group is we chose the members very slowly, so we were really able to pick people who had complementary areas of expertise, but we already put a lot of emphasis on people skills and the ability of people to learn from each other and to listen to each other. It was really a great intellectual adventure because I think everyone involved really benefited from it. We were a little bit like multi-headed hydra, in that each of us brought different things to the table.
It was just a very creative process. I should mention since we're at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences that our very first meeting was here in 2003 as the group was starting. I think one of our very last meeting was here as well in 2019.
Woody Powell: CASBS continues to have a long relationship with CFAR through that, so other programs have been through. Now, you've mentioned already Moroccan immigrants to France, but I think a lot of your work is focused on the dignity of work cross-nationally. Here I'd love for you to give us a sense of what you see, the different challenges of dignity and recognition in different settings, the US versus France or France and the US versus Brazil or Israel.
Michèle Lamont: Yeah, sure. Well, I can answer that question through two lenses or two books. My very first book was titled Money Malls and Manners, The Culture of the French and the American Apparent Class, and it drew on interviews in Indianapolis, New York, Paris and Clermont-Ferrand.
And it was a response to the book distinction by the very influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who said that the bourgeoisie, the upper middle class in general was very oriented towards selecting others based on their cultural sophistication. And in his books, he says people who are very moral make virtue of necessity. They are celebrating honesty because they cannot compete on the basis of money or how sophisticated they are.
And I thought that was basically wrong. So that's why I did interviews in Indianapolis in New York and Paris and Clermont-Ferrand, which is a kind of French Indianapolis. And I showed that moral boundaries were very strong in the four places, but drawn very differently.
So the Hoosiers talked about being a phony, a concept that doesn't have an equivalent in France. Well, French would draw moral boundaries against each other by talking about who's intellectually dishonest, which meant not living according to your principles. So I really showed that the dimensions of morality that were most salient through the interviews were vastly different, which means that dignity is also experienced through different concepts of worth.
And that was also salient when we did interviews with, in another book titled Getting Respect, for which we interviewed African Americans, Black Brazilians and three groups in Israel, which included Ethiopian Jews, about, so Black people in a three national context, about when they experience, when they feel that they're treated unfairly and how they respond to these assaults. And we argued that while the vast majority of the literature on racism in the US is about discrimination, not having access to work, housing, health, services, etc. When we interviewed them, most of what they talked about is what we called assault on the self, being underestimated, ignored, overlooked.
It's often about things that don't happen instead of things that happen. So, and that's about stigmatization. And we showed therefore that stigmatization is experienced very differently across national context, with, for instance, being ignored, being more salient, you know, for black Brazilians, let's say.
And then the responses are also very different, with much more confrontation in the US. And we argue that this is possible because of the civil rights movement, whereas in Brazil, when black Brazilians experience assault on the self, often they don't confront because they don't know first whether it was really racism. Maybe they're being excluded because they're presumed to be poor. You know, poverty is a much more important axis of inequality than race in Brazil. The level of intermarriage across racial group is higher. There's less residential segregation.
So all this to say all groups want dignity, all groups seek respect. But the repertoires of ways of answering varies a lot across countries. But we argue that that's also because of how the structure of inequality exists in those three national contexts, with different emphasis put on class and race and space. So that's a short, very, very limited description of the explanatory strategy of the book.
Woody Powell: Okay, that was quite succinct and lovely. I'm wondering, trying to connect that work and Seeing Others, where are you hopeful? Where do you see stigma being reduced? And where are these symbolic boundaries being crossed or transposed perhaps?
Michèle Lamont: Well, in the book, we compare, we give an example of two groups that we've compared in another article, which is people living with HIV AIDS and people who are obese. And we draw on two qualitative case studies that were produced by other sociologists, Steve Epstein's book on AIDS and Abigail Segui's book, What's Wrong with Fat? And we argue that in the first case, the stigma against people with AIDS declined drastically in part because there was collaboration between social movement activists and knowledge workers.
One of the big social contribution of knowledge workers, journalists, medical experts, legal experts, social scientists, is to provide evidence that get us to not blame the victim. So they were able to show anyone can get AIDS. It's not only, you know, gay people, gay men who are being too sexually active, you know.
So the de-stigmatization, the moral de-stigmatization of it was absolutely crucial. And then a lot of research, you know, showing how it diffuses and all that. And this never happened for people who are obese because they have always been presumed to be self-indulgent, lazy, not taking care of themselves, poor self-esteem.
So the de-stigmatization never happened there, in part because the medical researchers never stood in solidarity with that movement. So those are just two examples. Or the takeaway is de-stigmatization has happened to other groups, same-sex marriage, and it can happen more. And this is something that's in our hands. So the message of the book is very hopeful because, you know, group boundaries change. They have changed.
You have cities such as Tokyo and Rio where there's much less spatial segregation across classes. So we cannot presume that the reality we live in, in North America, is the only reality possible. And we can do a lot to transform group boundaries because they are already changing every day.
Woody Powell: Across your body of work, what would you like to be most known for?
Michèle Lamont: Oh, that's such a tough one, Woody. I think what I'm most trying to do is to help all of us develop a more multi-dimensional understanding of inequality. Not to deny in any way that distribution of resources is important, is crucial, but it doesn't work by itself.
It's supported and complemented by definitions of who we are that has a powerful impact on who gets what. So think about LGBTQ youth who get kicked out of the house by their parents because they don't accept how they self-define and then they end up homeless. So that's a case where stigmatization leads to material deprivation.
So I think we really need to question the basic Marxist assumption that economic forces drive everything, and we need to really develop a much more complex model of how inequality works. So that would be my objective at the, if you want, research level. But then my objective as a citizen or as a member of our society is really to fight against this notion that tribalism has hardwired all of us to be selfish.
I think human nature is a myth. We have a lot of narratives about human nature, but it can go both ways. We can be helpful to each other. We can be despicable toward each other. And I wish that people had a much more multi-dimensional understanding also of what human beings are capable of doing for each other. And I'm optimistic.
Woody Powell: I hear you saying membership and belonging are absolutely an essential part of this recognition. And so to think about tribalism in a different way is the things that connect us rather than the things that exclude us would be part of that.
Michèle Lamont: Yeah, but the us, there's a lot of us. You know, we can think of us as we're all human beings, just as we can think of us as only Christians or only straight people. So expanding the us is very much at the center, and also something that's important to mention in the context of this exchange is I come from a bizarre society.
You know, I grew up in Quebec. I left at the age of 20 to do my graduate work in France, and the experience of growing up there during the peak of the nationalist movement was a very powerful experience. It's a very, in some ways, anti-neoliberal society that has a strong sense of we.
Many English Canadians would say a too strong sense of we, but at the same time, you know, there was really a collective social project of taking a group that had been historically deeply stigmatized, you know, because it was a poor population. And the land that were given to people who came to Canada to colonize were extremely poor lands. Many of them went to Northern, to New England to work in the textile mills, you know, mills and the textile mills.
So I've witnessed up close the transformation of this collective identity, just as in the US. We've seen also a major transformation of African American identity, with up to Obama's election making many American aware, Wow, there's an American upper middle class, that's African American, which was, you know, for many Americans, black and ghetto was synonymous. So this complexification of understanding of the identity and the cultural output of African Americans has also changed enormously over the last decade.
So I think in the context where so many people have been depressed with the growing political polarization of American society, there's a real need to think better about the social mechanisms or the social dynamics that feed hope. And there's a wonderful social science literature on this that we can draw on, which is specifically on intersubjectivity and on how we need narrative to feed our imagination about what alternative futures can be. So I think that that's a motivation for my scholarship, which I hope will… I mean, many people are studying this in the social sciences, but I think it's a literature that's particularly useful in the times that we're living in now.
Woody Powell: So what are the remaining questions that you want to tackle? What's after this book? What are you thinking about next?
Michèle Lamont: Well, I'm thinking about a book that would be titled Recognition Globally, which would look at how people are seeking recognition through environmental justice, the case of indigenous people in Canada and Micronasia. Another one would be a comparison of non-college-educated workers in Manchester, UK and Manchester, New Hampshire, focused on political participation. And a third one would be the case of AI workers in the video game industries and in VFX, you know, special effects in electronic arts.
So this is a project that's in development and it would be a book written as basically a road trip, exploring how recognition claims manifest themselves globally through different sites as the economy is changing. So as certain sectors are booming, while others are retracting with the two Manchester's being cities that are trying to reinvent themselves through the knowledge economy. So, you know, I like to think of my life as a life of intellectual adventures.
And as I get older, I'm thinking it's interesting to think about projects that involve, you know, discovering different parts of the planet that I don't know and asking research questions that are building on what I've done already, but send me in new directions like I've never worked on environmental justice on AI, but I'm curious, so I want to explore that.
Woody Powell: Okay, well, you know, I was going to ask, to what extent do you think the problem of recognition is uniquely American, or uniquely North American? And I think your future work wants to tackle that issue head on.
Michèle Lamont: Yeah. And I think it would be very interesting to have a section on China too, because from what I understand, it's a context in which recognition claims are extremely difficult and extremely rare, because people don't make claim on the basis of gender or religion. There's a lot of claim making that we take for granted here that are simply not happening in this authoritarian context. So I'm also curious about that.
Woody Powell: Yes, now the question of what does recognition look like in autocratic settings is an interesting one. And there are people working on this, particularly people who study social media and those settings. So your colleague Yao Wen is a good example.
Michèle Lamont: Yeah, absolutely. I'm lucky to have great colleagues who help me, including you.
Woody Powell: Well, on that note, thank you, Michèle. It's been a treat talking with you.
Michèle Lamont: Thank you so much for making time for this, Woody.
Narrator: That was Michèle Lamont in conversation with Woody Powell. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.