Seeing Others: How Recognition Works – and How It Can Heal a Divided World
Seeing Others: How Recognition Works – and How It Can Heal a Divided World
Sociology; College of Social Sciences Hub
Date: Wednesday 13 December 2023
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Venue: Online (Zoom link to be emailed to registered attendees)
Category: Public lectures, Staff workshops and seminars
Speaker: Michèle Lamont, Harvard University
Website: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/seeing-others-how-recognition-works-and-how-it-can-heal-a-divided-world-tickets-719198290447
In this seminar, Professor Michèle Lamont will discuss her new book which explores the power of recognition – in rendering others as visible and valued – by drawing on nearly forty years of research and new interviews with young adults, and with cultural icons and change agents who intentionally practice recognition – from Nikole Hannah Jones and Cornel West to Michael Schur and Roxane Gay – showing how new narratives are essential for everyone to feel respect and assert their dignity.
Seeing Others: How Recognition Works – and How It Can Heal a Divided World, details how decades of neoliberalism have negatively impacted our sense of self-worth, up and down the income ladder, just as the American dream has become out of reach for most people. By prioritizing material and professional success, we have judged ourselves and others in terms of self-reliance, competition, and diplomas. The foregrounding of these attributes of the upper-middle class in our values system feeds into the marginalization of workers, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and minority groups.
The solution, Professor Lamont advances, is to shift our focus towards what we have in common while actively working to recognize the diverse ways one can live a life. Building on Lamont’s lifetime of expertise and revelatory connections between broad-ranging issues, Seeing Others delivers realistic sources of hope: by reducing stigma, we put change within reach.