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Michèle Lamont

Bio: Michèle Lamont is an academic researcher from Harvard University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Sociology of culture & Racism. The author has an hindex of 49, co-authored 160 publications receiving 17307 citations. Previous affiliations of Michèle Lamont include Princeton University & University of Michigan.


Papers
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01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: In this paper, a comparative analysis of equalization strategies across four cases: Palestinian citizens of Israel, Catholics in Northern Ireland, blacks in Brazil, and Quebecois in Canada is presented.
Abstract: This article offers a framework for analyzing variations in how members of stigmatized ethnoracial groups establish equivalence with dominant groups through the comparative study of “equalization strategies.” Whereas extant scholarship on anti-racism has focused on the struggle of social movements against institutional and political exclusion and social justice, we are concerned with the “everyday” anti-racist strategies deployed by members of stigmatized groups. We seek to compare how these strategies vary according to the permeability of inter-group boundaries. The first section defines our research problem and the second section locates our agenda within the current literature. The third section sketches an empirical context for the comparative analysis of equalization strategies across four cases: Palestinian citizens of Israel, Catholics in Northern Ireland, blacks in Brazil, and Quebecois in Canada. Whereas the first two cases are examples of ethnic conflict where group boundaries are tightly policed, the second cases exemplify more permeable boundaries. We conclude by offering tentative hypotheses about the relationship between the permeability of inter-group boundaries and the salience and range of equalization strategies used by members of stigmatized ethno-racial groups to establish equivalence with their counterparts in dominant majority groups.

17 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: The role of informal rules, the impact of evaluation settings on rules, definitions of originality, and comparisons between the humanities, the social sciences and history are summarized.
Abstract: This paper summarizes key findings of our research on peer review, which challenge the separation between cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of evaluation. Here we highlight some of the key findings from this research and discuss its relevance for understanding academic evaluation in the humanities. We summarize the role of informal rules, the impact of evaluation settings on rules, definitions of originality, and comparisons between the humanities, the social sciences and history. Taken together, the findings summarized here suggest a research agenda for developing a better empirical understanding of the specific characteristics of peer review evaluation in the humanities as compared to other disciplinary clusters.

16 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: Members of stigmatized groups often live with the expectation that they will be overscrutinized, overlooked, underappreciated, misunderstood, and disrespected in the course of their daily lives as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Members of stigmatized groups often live with the expectation that they will be overscrutinized, overlooked, underappreciated, misunderstood, and disrespected in the course of their daily lives. How do they interpret and respond to this lived reality? What resources do they have at their disposal to do so? How are their responses shaped by neoliberalism? How can responses to stigmatization foster social resilience?

16 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The articles in this issue were all commissioned in the immediate aftermath of the UK’s Brexit referendum result in June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in November 2016 to present a rapid sociological response to the challenges and questions posed by these tumultuous events.
Abstract: The articles in this issue were all commissioned in the immediate aftermath of the UK’s Brexit referendum result in June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in November 2016 to present a rapid sociological response to the challenges and questions posed by these tumultuous events. Ostensibly these are two very different kinds of political events. The Brexit referendum in the UK was an unprecedented popular vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union, whereas Trump was elected as a Republican candidate during the usual cycle of presidential elections. Notwithstanding the prominence of politicians such as Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson, Brexit was not focused around specific individual leaders, whereas the figure of Trump himself looms indelibly large in the American case. Brexit will be bound to have huge long-term constitutional implications for the UK, whereas Trump’s victory might have less fundamental consequences. And yet, there is also a clear sense of resonances between these two political events. Some of these resonances are superficial. Both were ‘radically unexpected’. The media, political institutions, and what might be termed ‘public opinion’ – at least of the liberal commentariat – was shocked by the unexpected results. They thus both speak to what might be termed the collapse of a certain kind of ‘liberal political rationality’, in which the political ‘rules of the game’ were well established and could lead to generally predictable outcomes within normally expected limits. Both Trump and Brexit can be seen to mark the eruption of new kinds of social forces, previously excluded, into the political arena in powerful, visceral and protean ways. Racism, xenophobia, sexism, elitism, marginality – issues which had previously been shooed away from the formal political arena, even though they continued to bubble ferociously in the political sidelines – erupted with remarkable force. The term ‘populism’ has sometimes been used to label and define this moment, but this is currently a loosely defined, and possibly inappropriate tool for this purpose – as several of the papers in this issue discuss.

15 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The distinctive contribution of this issue is to mobilize the analytical tools of cultural and political sociology to provide insight into the social and cultural factors that influence the level of social cohesion and societal solidarity.

15 citations


Cited by
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism are discussed. And the history of European ideas: Vol. 21, No. 5, pp. 721-722.

13,842 citations

01 Jan 1982
Abstract: Introduction 1. Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle 2. Images of Relationship 3. Concepts of Self and Morality 4. Crisis and Transition 5. Women's Rights and Women's Judgment 6. Visions of Maturity References Index of Study Participants General Index

7,539 citations

Book
08 Sep 2020
TL;DR: A review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers.
Abstract: Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

6,370 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Leslie McCall1
TL;DR: The authors argue that intersectionality is the most important theoretical contribution women's studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far, and they even say that intersectional is a central category of analysis in women’s studies, and that women are perhaps alone in the academy in the extent to which they have embraced intersectionality.
Abstract: Since critics first allegedthat feminism claimed tospeak universally for all women, feminist researchers havebeen acutely aware ofthe limitations of genderas a single analyticalcategory. In fact, feministsare perhaps alone in the academy in theextent to which theyhave embraced intersectionality – the relationshipsamong multiple dimensions andmodalities of social relations and subject formations – as itselfa central category ofanalysis. One could evensay that intersectionality isthe most important theoreticalcontribution that women’s studies,in conjunction with relatedfields, has made sofar.1

4,744 citations