Recognition, Globally

I am currently conducting research for my new book project tentatively titled "Recognition Globally" where I will analyze recognition claims in a variety of contexts and help us better understand how to move toward a more inclusive society. The project explores claims for political recognition by “invisible” US and UK working class youth living in Manchester New Hampshire and Manchester, UK; environmental justice claims by indigenous groups in the Northern Mariana Islands (Micronesia) and Algonquin territories in Canada; recognition through work for high-tech creators in video games and visual effects; and other cases.

This project is supported by various programs at Harvard (Asia Center, Canada Program, FAS Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship, The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, and the Weatherhead Center for Advanced Research).

In this book project conducted in collaboration with research assistants and British social scientists, I will mobilize comparative case studies to consider similarities and differences between three types of recognition: political recognition for the “invisible” working class youth in the US and the UK; environmental recognition for two indigenous groups in Micronesia and Eastern Canada; and recognition at work for high tech creators involved in the global production of videogames and special effects (VFX).

These studies all concern recognition in a different context of uncertainty about the future. They also concern groups that vary in terms of their “groupness” (the fluidity of their group identity and experienced symbolic boundaries) whether and how they voice claims about recognition, and whether and how they experience misrecognition.

This research will draw on over 300 interviews and on a global multi-sited organizational ethnography.

Intellectual Pluralism

Intellectual Pluralism and the Changing Scholarly Habitus in American Higher Education A Radcliffe Interdisciplinary Research Collaborative

Collaborator: Neil Gross, Colby College

Political diversity among faculty is diminishing, part of a long-term political realignment of the professional class more generally. What this entails for how academics do their job day-to day, and what the consequences may be for important outcomes like scholarly creativity and rigor or student learning, has been the subject of a great deal of speculation and policymaking—and virtually no research.

The starting point for our investigations is the assumption that academics organize their lives around carrying out specific tasks related to research, teaching and service; that their views on how to carry out these tasks are embedded in normative cultures; and that many express a commitment to protecting the autonomy of their profession. They cultivate a scholarly habitus organized around moral obligations that define appropriate behaviors. Informed by this assumption, which builds from our own research (e.g., Lamont, How Professors Think; Gross, Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?; Camic, Gross, and Lamont, eds., Social Knowledge in the Making) as well as scholarship on science and knowledge production by anthropologists, Science, Technology, and Society (STS) scholars, intellectual historians, philosophers, and others, our approach to intellectual diversity would consider how if at all the scholarly habitus, and with it research and teaching, is being challenged, redefined, or defended amid the changing political composition of the academy and in this moment of heightened political conflict over higher education.

Our approach allows us to consider a raft of issues, including how professors go about navigating political similarity and difference; the boundary-work they perform to demarcate their roles as academicians from their roles as concerned citizens; how they think about academic freedom; how they respond when external actors mistake academic autonomy for partisan inquiry; and the imprint that all this leaves on their ideas. We will consider not only the politicization of academic life, but also the many academics who want to stay away from politics, motivated by a range of reasons (mental health, quality of life, professionalism, negative views about current politics, time constraints, etc.). We are also interested in how a potentially changing scholarly habitus affects students’ experiences in the classroom, and the consequences of this for student learning and how they see the world. Just as we are interested in academics who wish to stay away from politics, we are especially keen to learn about the experiences of not very political students—a large but analytically neglected group—and how they are coping with the political conflict around them.

We will undertake surveys and qualitative interviews of faculty and students in selected disciplines universities nationwide. We are planning a longitudinal study that would allow us to track participants over a one year span, as they respond to rapidly changing political and institutional circumstances in the country and at their universities. We expect to focus mostly on US academics. Our research plan will be developed in conversation with leaders and other experts of higher education who have followed closely developments over the recent years. We look forward to working closely with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Research to implement this research agenda.