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.