Thammasat University students interested in sociology, political science, education, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 13 December Zoom webinar on Seeing Others: How Recognition Works – and How It Can Heal a Divided World.
The event, on Wednesday, 13 December at 8pm Bangkok time, is presented by the College of Social Sciences, the University of Glasgow, Scotland, the United Kingdom.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of sociology and recognition.
Students are invited to register at this link:
Professor Michèle Lamont is a Canadian sociologist who teaches European Studies, Sociology, and African American Studies at Harvard University, the United States of America.
She is a contributor to the study of culture, inequality, racism and anti-racism, the sociology of morality, evaluation and higher education, and the study of cultural and social change.
TU students may access her book Seeing Others: How Recognition Works – and How It Can Heal a Divided World through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
She explained in a recent interview posted online:
The book aims to rectify many of the habits that the American public has in thinking about inequality. I aim to shed light on an aspect of inequality that’s often neglected, which is what I call recognition—the process by which groups are viewed as worthy or stigmatized. I aim to explain to non-experts how this happens. It’s a process that’s going on all the time. And by recognition, I don’t mean, “I recognize Joe on the street,” or “I recognize that this is an apple.” I’m talking about seeing people and being able to define them as valuable. […]
One of the central themes is the importance of having a pluralistic understanding of worth. The period of growing inequality that came with neoliberalism supported narrow neoliberal scripts of self, emphasizing self-reliance, material success, having a college degree, consumption. And the alternative approach is to have multiple ways of assessing people’s worth – valuing not only people who make lots of money, but also those who do care work, for instance. So, it’s the idea of different people “shining under different lights,” which was also very central to my book on peer review, How Professors Think, concerning different types of scholarship. Another of my books, The Dignity of Working Men, emphasizes the ways in which French —and to a lesser degree, American —workers tried to put themselves above the upper-middle class by viewing themselves as more moral. This concept is also at the center of Seeing Others: I argue that a society in which only the college-educated professionals are the “winners” is a society that is extremely unhealthy for everyone. And that we need to think about how to create and scale up different narratives so that more people feel worthy—that’s the main argument of the book. I explain in the last chapters how this can be accomplished, and also how the eighty Gen Z young adults we interviewed (college students from the East Coast and the Midwest) contribute to achieving this, just as the change agents that we interviewed do. […]
The idea is also that we can create societies that allow for more or less collective resilience. So instead of thinking some people have grit and others do not, it’s more like we can we create societies that enable more social resilience. It’s a very big difference in perspective.
Professor Lamont noted in an editorial in July about events in American education:
Opinion: Yes, the Supreme Court has taken away rights and resources. But it’s so much worse
Just a year after the U.S. Supreme Court terminated women’s constitutional right to an abortion, it dealt a triple blow to our collective social fabric in one broad sweep with rulings that undid affirmative action in college admissions, weakened LGBTQ+ Americans’ protections against discrimination and struck down the Biden administration’s college debt forgiveness.
Considered together, these decisions all deprive relatively disadvantaged groups — women, Black and brown Americans, LBGTQ+ people, and lower-income college students and graduates — of legal and other resources that improve their welfare as well as their sense of belonging.
More than just “who gets what,” the court’s rulings affect who feels recognized as a worthy member of our society. Dignity is an essential dimension of well-being that is often overlooked in our materialistic culture. Research has shown that it impacts our health, feelings of belonging and willingness to contribute to society.
For many women, the court’s decision last year in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization symbolizes the subordination of their bodies to a patriarchal order in which their sovereignty over the course of their lives is deeply altered. Similarly, for many Black, brown, LGBTQ+ and lower-income young people who borrowed to support their studies, the end of the court’s latest term will be painfully remembered as an assault on their prolonged effort to gain full membership in American society despite the odds.
Since the latest decisions, my former students who gained access to college and the middle class thanks partly to affirmative action have been expressing deep disappointment in what they see as a “broken contract.” The court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard undermined their belief that good-faith efforts and hard work could be rewarded with full social and economic integration.
As for my LGBTQ+ mentees, they were already reeling from escalating attacks in Republican-controlled states. The Supreme Court’s 303 Creative decision, which deemed a web designer’s supposed freedom of expression more important than their equal rights, left many with mounting anxiety about their position in America, forcing them to reconsider their already fragile faith in our national covenant.
These decisions go beyond revoking rights and violating trust. They raise questions about how these members of the middle class will go on pursuing their callings and contributing to the education and upward mobility of marginalized groups. Their personal commitment to these goals is priceless and essential to reducing inequality in American society. It will not be easily supplemented, revived or replaced.
The conservative justices appeal to a view of the American past grounded in heroic visions of individualism and anti-state attitudes — ideals the country allegedly was built on and must continue to celebrate today. Yet a shared commitment to a collective vision of freedom for all is equally part of our identity and history.
While the policy implications of these rulings have been thoroughly covered, we also need to pay heed to their repercussions for our collective quality of life. We should consider their impact not just on access to resources and protection from discrimination but also the broader message they send about whose past sufferings should be acknowledged and compensated, and how much weight should be put on the history of each group as we shape our shared future. Legal and policy decisions that stigmatize and deny recognition to vulnerable groups make that future more precarious for everyone.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)