2026 S.D. Clark Lecture | Trump’s Great Symbolic Reshuffling and Beyond: Recognition, Stigmatization and Cultural Processes

In this lecture, Michèle Lamont will discuss cultural processes such as recognition and stigmatization through an analysis of recent political developments in the United States. After revisiting her book “Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How it Can Heal a Divided World, she explores how young American, British and Finish workers seek recognition through politics, and on how indigenous people in Eastern Canada and Micronesia are seeking recognition through environmental justice and jobs. These paired case studies will figure in a book in progress tentatively titled Recognition Globally.

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. Born in 1957, she grew up in Quebec and studied political theory at the University of Ottawa before obtaining a doctorate in sociology at the University of Paris in 1983. After completing post-doctoral research at Stanford University, she has served on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin (1985-87), Princeton University (1987-2002) and Harvard University (2003-present). A cultural and comparative sociologist who studies inclusion and inequality, she has researched how we evaluate social worth across societies, the role of cultural processes in fostering inequality, symbolic and social boundaries, and the evaluation of knowledge, as well as topics such as dignity, stigma, racism, class cultures, collective well-being, social resilience, and social change. Her books include Money, Morals and Manners: the Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class (1992), The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration(2000), How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement (2009), Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the Us, Brazil and Israel(coauthored, 2016), and Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World (2023). She is also the author of several collective works, and over a hundred articles published in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Human Nature Behavior, and other prominent outlets.  She served as the 108th president of the American Sociological Association in 2016-17.  She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Society of Canada, and the British Academy. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Carnegie Fellowship, Leverhulme Fellowship, the 2014 Gutenberg award, the 2017 Erasmus Prize, the 2024 Kohli Prize for Sociology, and honorary doctorates from six countries.