Global dignity and seeing others: political and environmental recognition compared
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Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Welcome to the LSE for this public lecture. My name is Sam Friedman. I'm Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Very pleased to be here today.

Welcoming our speaker to LSE this evening, Michelle Lamont is Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Harvard, where she specializes in cultural and comparative sociology. I would say her research has been consistently groundbreaking in sociology, as well as her deep empirical insights.

that her work has provided on topics like social judgment, worth and dignity, stigma and discrimination, and knowledge evaluation. She's also furnished sociology with a range of conceptual tools and frameworks that I think have been particularly influential, particularly the idea of symbolic boundaries and boundary work more generally. On a personal level, Michelle's work has had a big influence on me

I remember the Eureka movement of finding her work during my PhD and I was trying to make sense of the way in which people in Britain use humour and comedy to draw not only cultural and aesthetic boundaries but also moral ones. Michelle has written several influential books including Money, Morals and Manners, The Dignity of Working Men and most recently Seeing Others.

She also served as the president of the American Sociological Association in 2016-17 and is currently a Leverhulme visiting professor at the University of Manchester.

Tonight, I believe Michelle will discuss her ongoing collaborative research on whether and how American and British young workers in the two Manchesters are searching for recognition through politics, how indigenous people in Canada and Micronesia are seeking recognition through environmental justice and jobs, and the more general challenge of seeking recognition where it is impossible to obtain.

If you'd like to join the debate on social media, the hashtag for today's event is #LSEevents. The event is being recorded, hopefully will be made available as a podcast subject to technical difficulties. As usual, there'll be a chance for you to put your questions to Michelle after the lecture. I believe Michelle will talk for about 45 to 50 minutes. So without further ado, I'll pass over to you, Michelle. Welcome.

Well, thank you so much for this kind introduction, Sam, and thank you also for inviting me to talk about my work here today. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you for showing up, although there's beautiful sun outside. I know that it's luxury here in London, and it's just before your spring break, so I'm sure you all look forward to doing something else than hanging out in lecture halls.

So, yes, I'm going to talk about this book, which actually came out in fall of 2023. And the last time I gave a talk in this very room was in 2017. I had been asked to, I was the British Journal of Sociology lecturer that year, and I presented a paper titled From Having to Being, which in fact was the inspiration.

for seeing others. So it's really nice for me to be able to come back. In that lecture I went back to Marcuse and other people that have been really important to me as I was a graduate student. So it was really a very nice moment for me, so it's great to be back here. So,

So this book, Seeing Others, basically it's been out for a year and a half, so I've been giving talks on it but I've also moved forward in my research agenda and I was a visiting professor for a month at the University of Manchester in May of '23 at the invitation of the British sociologist Andrew Miles and we started talking about

you know, what's happening with young workers 18 to 30 who don't have a college degree. It's a group that is far less talked about or was certainly far less talked about then than the college educator Gen Zs who are progressive and tons has been written on those. So we decided to focus on this by studying Manchester, New Hampshire and Manchester, UK. Actually, it's a little bit of a misnomer because in fact the empirical work in the UK is being done in all of them.

And actually now the project is the three Manchesters because since we started this, there's someone who, a Finnish researcher from Finland, who works on Tempere, which is the Finnish Manchester. So now we have three Manchesters, so you'll hear a little bit about this later. But to go back to seeing others, so the inspiration for this book was what is now unfortunately known as the first Trump presidency.

And as this moment in history, after he was elected, he started talking about the Muslim travel ban and of course, you know, lots of

declaration against LGBTQI people. So I was very attuned to the fact that he was engaging in stigmatization. Sociologists have the tools to talk about this, but the general population doesn't necessarily have this. And at the time I had colleagues, Danielle Ziblatt and Steve Levitsky, who had just published their book, "How Democracy Dies."

which was very effective in explaining to the general audience, based on their scholarship on authoritarianism in Latin America and Europe, the process by which democracy is weakened.

And just today, Steve Levitsky is in the media because he's attacking Harvard's president for basically kissing up to Trump. So his scholarship on authoritarianism continues to influence what he does. But here you have the cover of the book, two covers. The yellow one is the Penguin version that you can find in the UK. The white one is the American version. And I partly like this one because the question that book asks is,

the one on the British cover, how to redefine worth in a divided world with the goal of broadening the circle of those who feel they matter, those who feel they belong.

And here you have the circle with groups of different size and colors that are further or closer from the circle. So the book really answers this question by proposing to the general leader. It's a trade book, so it draws on a lot of sociological knowledge that is not original. Some of the data is original, but some of the theory is not.

To help the general reader understand what we can do, you have Jonathan Haidt and others who talk about tribalism, the idea that we are wired to like people like us. It's all about human nature. My point of departure is we don't know anything about human nature. It's a narrative. So in fact, there is a lot that we know about what makes group boundaries more or less permeable or flexible.

And the book is basically about that, although this is sociological language that I don't use in the book because it's for general readers. And the second part, how it can heal a divided world, I really didn't want, but since the book was published by Simon & Schuster, they wanted to be able to list it under the self-help section, which really pained me, but basically I had to go along with it.

So the context also, besides the Trump presidency, in which I started imagining this book, is a concept of an explosion of social movements by different groups that felt that they were marginalized, they felt they were not given their due. So Black Lives Matter, Me Too, on the progressive, liberal end of the political spectrum, but on the conservative end, the MAGA movement.

So one of the goals was really to make the reader understand that these groups were seeking affirmation of their dignity and this is a process that exists across the political spectrum and we really need to understand it in part because dignity matters for well-being as much as material resources. So this is really based on a multi-dimensional understanding of inequality that I'll return to in a few minutes.

well known if you look at the research on well-being, the allostatic load, the impact of racism on stress and on subjective mental health, etc.

So the question is again, who matters, who belongs, who is us? And in order to study this, I turned to two groups. The first groups are professional change agents, people whose job it is to create narratives that will influence how we think about who's in and who's out, who matters more or less. So it's based on interviews. And the other group are Gen Zs, young people

born around the start of the century, who when we interviewed them during the pandemic and just a little bit before the pandemic were college students. So you have 80 people in the Midwest and the East Coast, half of them working class, half of them we define as privileged.

And this project is really focused on the progressive liberal end of the political spectrum. So we don't have the Andrew Taits and the Jordan Peterson. Other people are writing this book. I could not do everything in this book, but at the end of the talk, I will come back to what's happening in the US today where Trump is spending a lot of time attacking the very cultural sectors that I have studied in ways that are extremely aggressive.

So the two t-shirts that you see here on the white t-shirt is worn by someone named Zachary Drucker, who's a trans person who was a consultant on the show Transparent.

And for the project, I interviewed Joy Soloway, who is the creator of the show Transparent, and I also interviewed Drucker. When I asked them why this show existed, they said, "Our goal is to make trans people less abhorrent and more understandable."

to depict them through their everyday life in a way that will allow the general viewer to relate to them. So Transparent is a show about someone who becomes a trans woman, events middle age, she has to negotiate a new identity with her adult children. So this is something that many people can relate to as children or a parent. And it really humanizes. Joyce always said, my goal is to humanize.

this woman and to depict her in a more multi-dimensional way. So the words that I just used now are words that are used time and time again by the 185 people we interviewed for this project. Humanize, try to multi-dimensional away from stereotype, make visible, make understandable. So a lot of it is about destigmatization essentially.

And the other t-shirt is something that became a poster that you could find on many people's lawns and in their windows all over the US during the pandemic. And it's a proclamation of the importance of what in the book I call ordinary universalism, the idea of what we all share as human beings essentially.

So here you have "No Human is Illegal," which was a response to Trump's attack against undocumented immigrants. "Love is Love," a slogan that was at the center of the same-sex marriage campaign. "Black Lives Matter." "Kindness is Everything." I'm not embracing "kindness is everything" for a reason. I'll explain in a few minutes. But these two t-shirts really convey a lot of what seeing others is about. And of course, seeing others is an expression that has been embraced by Gen Zs and millennials.

in a context where the American dream really seems out of reach for them. And what has, I will argue that one of the things that has happened over the last few years is them coming out with what became known as woke culture, but a lot of this is about formulating an alternative form of hope that will keep people going in the context where the American dream simply has lost its traction.

And the idea is that people should live their best life now and that should be accomplished in part by being able to live authentically. So to be able to be public about who you want to be and ask people to treat you the way you think according to who you want to be and to be authentic.

So that's the context in which I think things like non-binary restroom or the pronouns became something that the Gen Zs really embraced as a way to manifest

how important it is for them to be recognized for who they want to be. So it's kind of an ideological shift away from an ideology of the American dream that is deeply assimilationist and oriented toward a word mobility at the time when these generations don't have access to this and how they come up with an alternative form of hope that is grounded in inclusion and authenticity

in a context of four decades of growing inequality.

So it's really about the production of narratives of hope. And during this first Trump presidency, like many people, I was depressed. So I started reading the literature on hope, where does it come from? And when you read it, there's a wonderful sociological literature on this, you learn that exposure to alternative narratives is absolutely crucial because it allows people, it gives people the tools they need to be able to articulate, to imagine an alternative future, which gives them hope.

So I think a lot of what these professional change agents and agencies did at the time that we interviewed them was very much to create world views and diffuse narratives that would give people those tools. Now you may ask what do we care given what's happening in the U.S. today? Well you will see I think I would suggest that these same views, these same narratives continue to be

produced every day and we have to remember that Trump didn't get the majority of votes. He got less votes than his opponents combined and a lot of this cultural production is continuing even if it's very much on the defensive right now. So we're gonna have elections in two years from now and we'll see what happens but we cannot presume that what's happening in the White House summarizes what's happening in the US as a whole. A lot of Americans are not behind Trump

So the case study, as I said, is based on these interviews with agents of change, 185 interviews with individuals working across a number of organizational fields.

This includes 75 interviews with comedians and Hollywood creatives, which resulted in a few separate papers. But you have also a lot of people in philanthropy, inclusive capitalism, a lot of other fields that you'll see in a second, and those 80 Gen Zs that I mentioned already. I didn't do the interviews with Gen Zs because they're really pissed at boomers.

So I had, they think we really screwed up with climate change, but I had two graduate students who are really kind women, and Gen Z's who did these interviews. As for the interviews with the Hollywood creative, this was the most popular assignment in my department for a few years because we really have a great, great list of people who were interviewed.

So theoretically, some of the groundings of this project is based on a book, a larger interdisciplinary project in which I was involved for 19 years. We were a team of social scientists from various disciplines. We met three times a year for 19 years, and we studied what we didn't like to call successful societies, but it's the name that was given to us by the organization that funded the work.

And the idea was that, you know, what are the conditions under which societies can face the challenges that they meet and how can we mobilize tools such as institutions and cultural repertoires to help both social groups and societies and institutions meet those challenges.

So it's very much an alternative to the focus on individual grit that psychologists such as Angela Duckworth have been talking about and which has been widely covered in the media. I'm sure you're all familiar with this and it's all about how individuals can pull themselves by their bootstrap. Instead we're asking how can we create societies that give people the tools they need to develop their capabilities to face challenges.

And these tools are to be found in institutions and in cultural repertoires and the cultural toolkits that are made available to us. So in this book, the cultural repertoires that I'm going to be focusing on are the ones that are created by these agents of change that I'm going to talk about. But this same thing is happening to institutions. So if we think about, for instance, same-sex marriage,

was not created to diffuse narratives about social inclusion and recognition to LGBTQI people, but to give them access to equal rights. And yet, because it contained messages about affirming their value and their access to one of the most sacred institutions of American society, the passage of these laws were correlated with the decline in attempted suicide.

So it's a little bit like about the unintended consequence of a lot of institutional legal change and policy changes that provided destigmatization and affirmation. So there's a couple of, I'm not going to go along too much with the definition, but the

The book really hinges on this concept of recognition. There's a lot of philosophers who've written on this, Hegel, but also more recently Axel Hanet and Nancy Fraser. And it has to do with the social act by which the positive social work of an individual or group is affirmed or acknowledged by others. So what is key here is that it is intersubjective.

it involves validation by others. If you think about Richard Jenkins' theory of social identity, our identity results from a combination of self-identification. What do I define myself as? But also group categorization. How other groups define myself as. And the two of them together interact to create our social identity. So this is happening...

through positive affirmation, but also through stigmatization. And the two of them are unfolding as we lead our lives. So there are cultural processes that are constantly ongoing. When you have a job, you may be in an environment where you feel supported or not. As a member of an ethnic group, there's constant, you know, public exchanges about what your ethnic group or your religious group is about around moral boundaries and other types of boundaries.

So, and these identities get to be institutionalized in part through categorizations that the state uses or that are used in our organizations, etc. So, since this is an audience, an academic audience, I'll tell you a little bit about the metatheoretical

assumptions or theories that are behind this research. So it's really about understanding, you know, if you take the third column there, how to connect microprocesses to microprocesses, where the question mark is there. So in there you can put institutions and cultural repertoires that I've already mentioned.

And behind this is a kind of multi-dimensional understanding of how inequality is produced. So if you think about the classes we teach as sociologists,

Sociology of Inequality. We go from the type one processes, which are the classics that we all teach about, Weber and Marx, domination, exploitation, opportunity, or the enclosure. These concepts are very much at the center of books such as Durable Inequality by Chas Dilley, or Mike Savage's book on inequality that was produced a few years ago. There's much more than that.

The type two processes became very popular during the 80s as the Bolzio's work became widely diffused internationally. So this is basically about cultural, symbolic, social, economic capital. And the third type is

points to processes, cultural processes that are intersubjective and that unfolds as we lead our daily life. And it's all again, you know, we had the beginning domination, exploitation, etc. Here we have recognition, racialization, stigmatization, identification. They're all processes, but they have to do with intersubjective definition of identity.

and they all feed into inequality. So one could say, okay, this is just a culturalist understanding of inequality, but no, it's not, because we also factor in, if you understand inequality as resulting from multi-causal processes, you would have in there also things like ecological effect that people who study neighborhood effects are focused on. You could have also distribution of resources, materialist distribution.

So it's not a question of choosing between a materialist or culturalist understanding of sociology. It's really toward moving toward a much more multidimensional understanding of how inequality is produced. And I have written several papers that are developing this perspective. The main one would be the first one, What is Missing? Cultural Processes in the Making of Inequality.

And I would say the paper I presented here in 2017, From Having to Being, is very much part of this as well. Okay, so now let's turn to the argument of the book itself. So, you know, many things have happened with the diffusion of neoliberalism over the last 40 years from, you know, often with Thatcher and Reagan as the opening words.

point for this, but the aspect that interests me most is the scripts of self that have become highly institutionalized during these 40 years, which basically tell us what kind of human beings we're supposed to be, what is desirable. And the model that perhaps become extremely predominant is one that can be described as a neoliberal scripts of self, which tells us we're supposed to be highly successful, effective, agentic,

engage into privatization of self, that means of risk, which means you're not supposed to live off welfare, you're supposed to be self-reliant, you're supposed to try to

be upwardly mobile, gain education, be able to consume, and be competitive. And meritocracy is very much part of this whole package because it's presumed that whatever you achieve is achieved because of your hard work and your persistence. It's an ideology that presumes that we're all born in a, you know,

We're playing in the same sandbox, but in fact we're not. My kids have two parents who have college degrees, sorry, not college degrees, PhDs, so of course they're born on an escalator, and sociologists of education have produced an enormous literature on this, but nevertheless, at the level of the media, meritocracy continues to be celebrated as something fair and just to which we should aspire.

And it's something in which most people across all advanced industrial societies have become deeply invested. So here, an article by Jonathan Meiss, who used to be a postdoc here, that showed that across 25, I think,

advanced industrial societies, the belief in meritocracy has grown exponentially since 1930. So in the US, for instance, something like 95% of Americans believe that meritocracy works and is highly valued. In the UK, it's just slightly less. It's

viewed as very important in all those societies but five which includes Canada and France for some reason and I'm Canadian by the way. So one of the problem with this neoliberal scripts of self is that with the American dream it really feeds into very rigid symbolic boundaries with defined people like us in this room as highly valuable, desirable, we can consume, we have access to you know

most of what society offers because we have the college degree the university degree that has more and more been operating as a basis for caste system and at the same time the working class is Consistently described as of lower status and unworthy this is documented for instance by in a book by Richard Butch who did the content analysis of

of all entertainment television shows over 50 years and shows that during all this period the vast majority of the characters on these shows are upper middle class, you know, think of or even upper class, White Lotus, The Wife of Beverly Hills, on and on and on. And the few times where you have working class characters who are present, they are idiots.

Ed McFaun, like think about Bart Simpson, just one example. So you really have this bifurcation in who is construed as worthy and it has fed, I think, a growing mental health crisis among people in the lower half of the social ladder.

as they view themselves as not recognized as unworthy, as being put down. And this has been correlated, you know the argument by Anne Case and Angus Deaton that by despair, you know, the opioid epidemic, I could go on and on about how the negative outcomes that have been associated with that. It's not great for the upper middle class either because

They have been so paralyzed by the idea of downward mobility, especially since 2008, that many of them have become extremely anxious about downward mobility and work. So the symptom of helicopter parenting and overwork has also had quite negative effect on a lot of upper middle class people in the mental health crisis that we face.

So given this rather dire picture that I just described, we can ask ourselves how do we move forward? So that's where cultural production comes in. So we can ask ourselves what are the alternative cultural narrative, who produces them, what are the messages?

And the book focuses on three different messages that may have positive effect on our collective definition of who's worthy. One would be to move away from neoliberal conceptions of worth that are basically unique and dimensional.

you know, money, consumption, education, versus a much wider repertoire of who's worthy that would include people who are caring, spiritual leaders, a lot of other ways to contribute to society. A second path would be to focus on ordinary universalism, which I argue is specifically what Gen Zs are pushing for with their emphasis on

inclusion and authenticity. And the third one is to understand how stigma has been reduced in the past and how it can be reduced again, precisely against those who pretend that tribalism is built into our human nature, hardwired as they like to say.

So in order to show how this works, we have these interviews that were conducted across a number of organizational sectors.

And this is a kind of depiction of the public sphere if you want, although these bubbles are of course much of very different size and there's many more organizational fields that are involved in the production of the narratives that structure our environment. But some of the people we interviewed, I could show you several slides here, but I'm just going to

show you this one, some of the Hollywood people we interview, which includes Michael Schur, who produced The Office in the US, The Good Life, Park and Recreation, The Queer Eye, you know, lots of interesting people.

We were very lucky because it was the pandemic and everyone was available. We used network to reach out to people and then we sent them a letter saying, "These people have accepted to participate. Do you want to accept to participate?" It worked really well. You just count on FOMO and it works really well. If you look at the book, you will see the complete list.

So just to give you a few highlights of what we found, there's a paper that's now forthcoming in Work and Occupation, which is specifically on the stand-up comics and Hollywood creative, and we developed a typology of the strategies they use, how they describe them. So we asked them, what do you do in your show? Why do you do it? And they would say many of them were very committed to promoting inclusion. So one of the strategies would be the first one, the Trojan horse, we called it,

where they say our goal is not to force people to eat their vegetables, we're there to make them laugh, but as we tell them our jokes, we also make fun of racist people or homophobic people. And that really came to, you know, I think of the

75 people we interviewed, only a handful of them opposed to what is called laughter, the idea that you use politics to get laughter. And these people were older white men who told jokes about sex which they thought were not political jokes. Well, in fact, they were very much political jokes because they tended to be very, you know, misogynistic, etc.

Anyway, so this is just a little flash to say this is how these narratives can be changed at the ground level and they spread out and they diffuse. It's a little bit like the thousand points of light that Bush talked about but in a very different kinds of way.

So an example, if you want to Google this on YouTube, Question Bridge, you will see this video produced by an artist named Hank Willis Thomas, African American artist, who interviewed I think 150 black men asking them the simple question, what does it mean for you to be a black man in the US today?

and he found that there was enormous diversity in their answers except for one thing, they all talked about how they experience microaggression in their daily life. But what's interesting with this work of art, he's an art photographer, is that he collaborated with an organization, a philanthropic organization called the Campaign for Black Male Achievement,

And this is like a network of more than 2,000 organizations across the U.S. And the local chapters used this video and diffused it in high schools and in community centers to create conversation around the stigma of black men. And the goal was precisely to challenge this stigma through collective conversation.

So in the book, I talk about this collaboration between philanthropists and cultural producers, which I describe as recognition chains, which are central to creating narrative change. And this is very much at the center of the philanthropic sector for the last 15 years. The Ford Foundation, which is one of the largest foundations in the world, played a crucial role in leading this by...

When Darren Walker, who is the president, who is stepping down around now, came to

disposition in 2013, he said my plan is to attack inequality but I'm going to do this through four pillars and one of them is what he called capturing hearts and minds which is narrative change. So that was quite revolutionary at the time to say we're going to use the money of this extremely powerful institution to create narrative change.

not only what had been done before, which was to give a lot of money to economists to do things like moving to opportunity, but really to stimulate cultural creation. So one of the things they did is they created an organization called Just Film,

which financed films, some of them became very influential. So if you think of Roma, for instance, which won an Oscar and it depicts two indigenous women in Mexico City who are working for a middle class family. And the whole film, you have the camera on the face of these two women and the middle class family is blurred in the background. And one of those two women is thinking about getting an abortion.

So I interviewed Agent Poo, who was the director of the Alliance for Domestic Workers, who collaborated as a consultant on this film. And I was told, you know,

The goal here is really to humanize, so again the same word, humanize, dignify, make visible groups that have been historically very stigmatized. And this film went on to win an Oscar and it was diffused very broadly on Netflix. So that again is an example of scaling up. It's not only about the production of narrative, it's about scaling up narratives to a point they become extremely visible and they structure what people think

what kind of society becomes valuable. So that's the first approach, you know, this multiplication and destigmatization of stigmatized groups and transform, you know, popularizing a much more diverse understanding of worthy self. We can also think about the process by which groups that have been historically stigmatized become less stigmatized.

So I'll give the example of people with HIV/AIDS who were deeply stigmatized when the AIDS crisis started in 1980. I remember I was in Palo Alto then, 1983. People were really scared of people with HIV/AIDS and the disease was construed as, you know, tied to moral boundaries, you know, gay men who were spending too much time having sex with random people in public bathroom. And then over time,

This association was really interrupted and the key actors there were knowledge workers, legal experts, medical experts, social scientists, journalists, who provided alternative frames saying no, that's not how it works, anyone can get AIDS.

So these changes, you have the actors there, not only knowledge workers but also social movement activists and public figures that drew on the cultural resources that were available in the environment to engage in destigmatizing action. So the point is this is a process, it's accomplished, it can happen more.

It didn't happen for people with obesity. So here we draw on Abigail Sege's book, What's Wrong With Fat?, where she explains how the medical experts objected to the idea of healthy at any weight. So this destigmatization did not happen for people living with obesity, but it did happen for... So the point is it has happened, it can happen more.

And then the intervention of Gen Z's was very much to kind of revisit what an ideal life would look like.

So we have a couple of papers that look in depth at, there's a chapter in the book that's about them, but we also have this paper that looks in depth at how they understand the challenges of contemporary society and what kind of life they want. And what we find is they're young Americans, so they are genetic, they think it's important to take their life in their hand, but they also do something that people in my generation didn't do. They believe that they have something called mental health issues,

and they really want to work toward the work-life balance, which is really crucial. So that is kind of a very revolutionary thing, but they also embrace the ordinary universalism that I talked about earlier, and that has been decried often as wokeism.

So the book at the end of the day is really about the diffusion of these repertoires that trickle down at the level of everyday life. So this is another poster that you could find everywhere also during the first Trump presidency, which is an affirmation of ordinary universalism. To see there's a lot of things that all human beings share and these are things that we celebrate. Of course it's not the end of the story because

Okay, the point here beyond empathy is because it's not only a question of telling people be nice, be empathic, it's really about structuring our environment in such a way that these repertoires are widely available and are really providing people the tools they need to lead them to think more in terms of weakening boundaries and being more inclusive.

At the same time, we now know what's happening since the beginning of the second Trump presidency, which is that he's been

rapidly attacking those very cultural producers. So here I've highlighted what's happened only in the last two months is attack against the Kennedy Center, Public Radio, Voice of America, the Smithsonian Museum. He's upset that all the museums in D.C. are not focusing enough on American greatness and are focusing too much on slavery and on, you know,

all the injustices of the world and just this week is really ramping up his attack on academic freedom in the name of fighting anti-Semitism. As we saw today, the president of my own university says, yeah, we really have a big problem with anti-Semitism and he's not responding to Trump by saying, yes, you're using this in part to

to, you know, limit what's happening, what can be said in academia.

Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event. Okay, so we could go on for half an hour, but I'm not going to talk about this more because that would be another talk altogether. But now, very quickly, because I just have maybe another five to ten minutes, I'll tell you about what we're doing right now.

So the idea, this book that I talked to you about is largely focused on the US, although there's lots of connection with what's happening elsewhere as well. I think a lot of the changes that I've documented since the last few decades hold in many European societies. DEI, of course, has been promoted far more in the US than elsewhere, but it's also very present here as well.

But now we want to, the question of this new book that I'm now starting to work on is really about paths to recognition. It's not about how recognition can be broadened, but it's about how various groups are using different paths to gain recognition.

So we have different pair case studies where we're going to explore how this is happening across contexts. So the first one is about how groups are seeking recognition through politics, whether and how. And also how, so this is the case of the working class youth that feels very much that it has been marginalized

in the context of politics, that it has been invisible, that it doesn't have a voice. So how do they respond to this? So we presented our first paper at the Eastern Sociological Society three weeks ago. We now summarize briefly the result to you. A second project, so basically here the interviews in Manchester, New Hampshire are completed, 45 interviews, and have been coded, although it's still ongoing.

The process to gain human subject approval in the UK can be extremely slow.

The interviews in Oldham are still very much unfolding. So unfortunately it's too early to talk about findings there and the same thing holds for Finland. Second part of the project is about First Nations and this is a very important project to me because I grew up just next to Ottawa and there's two hours north of where I grew up First Nation people who live there.

and I'll explain this to you in a second. And then, so the book will have these paired case studies, but will also focus on what I call the impossible cases. So how do people can claim recognition at LBGTQI in Senegal, Uganda, or even China, race in France, religion in China, immigrant workers in Hong Kong, et cetera. So the case of the two Manchesters

is that both places are the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in the respective countries. They are kind of similar because the two cities, if you look at Oldham or even Manchester, UK and Manchester, New Hampshire, they were both at the center of the textile industry in both countries. They also had huge working class movement, extremely important strike. So one of the questions we ask is,

What about place identity? What about memories of these working class fights? Do these still have a presence in how workers in the two places are thinking about their class identity and their politics? So,

basically our day, we ask ourselves, are they seeking recognition by staying away from politics, by embracing far-right politics, by embracing more progressive politics? So it's a little bit of a revisit of this enormous literature on working class identity in the US and the UK. Seymour Martin-Lipset has written a very classical study, Why No Socialism in America, so we are planning to

some of these questions with the data that we are collecting now in depth interviews, 45 interviews in each.

countries, so it's been very complicated because workers don't want to be studied anymore at all, especially non-young workers. Interviewing Gen Zs is very complicated because you make appointments with them and they don't show up and they don't tell you about it. There's very much a feeling that data extraction is not cool and they don't feel any responsibility to contribute to social science knowledge.

The people in the US that we interviewed experienced a huge amount of insecurity. The minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. You don't buy two Starbucks coffee with that, and it's been that since 2015. So they are really suffering. Many of them have two jobs. And it's a purple state, which means it can go red or blue.

Republican or Democrat, and we did not expect this, but as we did the interviews between May and December during the presidential campaign, a large number of them progressively told us, yeah, we're not going to vote for Biden-Harris because we're really pissed at Democrats. They tell us that everything is fine, that the economy is fine, but no, we have to, we're very close to being evicted. You know, the experience of, you know,

the inflation and the challenges to the economic challenges were just too big. But a large number of them are what would be called low information workers, sorry, low information voters or non-voters.

We argue that, well, first a lot of them are extremely allergic to politics. They feel that politics is drama. So they try to avoid it. Families are being split. It's just extremely difficult. So many of them try to stay away from it. But in the paper that we presented three weeks ago, we argued that there's various paths that they use.

The two most popular path would be distance from politics. I stay away from it because politicians don't care about people like me and my best bet is simply to try to ignore it and lead my life without it. So it's a way of gaining recognition by maintaining distance and being agentic to some extent. And also what we call recognition through exclusion, which is to say,

I gained recognition by refusing to support other people who are freeloading off me. So the anti-sponge argument, that's the Trumpian who say we're not gonna support Ukraine, we're not gonna support Gaza, we're not gonna support undocumented immigrants, we're just gonna support people like me, hardworking Americans who are just carrying their weight and too bad for everyone else. And that's a very, a third of our respondents are taking this perspective.

Recognition through inclusion, which we define as basically those who are voting Democrats are very much altruistic and often they connect their politics, their altruistic politics to their own identity as people of color or as LGBTQI.

and recognition by elevation, which we don't analyze in depth in the papers, really, we're independent because we want to, we can make up our mind independently of parties. So they draw very strong boundaries toward people below, they are strongly identified toward people above, and they embrace the American dream.

and they don't know what unions are. You ask them what social class are you from, they don't know what's a social class. So we expect really strong contrast with the Oldham respondents on all these dimensions where also we expect that in Oldham they will have much more of a sense of place identity that would be tied to their class identity.

These people, you know, like the American working class moves around a lot, so they don't have any sense of what's happened in Manchester, New Hampshire before. And no nostalgia. A lot of the literature on the growing popularity of the radical right is about the nostalgia of the working class. They don't have any nostalgia. They don't know what was happening 20 years ago.

So it's very interesting, I think, the data are kind of bringing a lot of correctives to, at least in the American context.

assumptions that we have about what's happening in the American working class. And finally, I'll say two words about the indigenous project, which I'm really fascinated about. So Ottawa, the lower black circle is where I grew up. I grew up on the Quebec side, just across the river. On one side of the river, everyone speaks English or the majority speaks English. On the other side, the majority speaks French, which is where I grew up.

And the two lowest circles there, Pekwakanagan and Kiberwak, which is the one further left, these are the two First Nations where I was able to gain access, which has been extremely difficult because there's been so much extraction, they are extremely distrustful. It's a process of negotiation. At least 2,000 emails were sent to make this work.

So there's a nuclear waste disposal that is being built just across the river from Pekwa Kanagan there. And this is, this white section here is the

Otawa River watershed. In Algonquin language, it's called the Kishizibi River. And this is larger than Europe. You've never heard about this, but it's just one watershed. You can imagine the size of the territory. But this nuclear waste disposal site

you can imagine it could pollute the water for the whole region of the capital, Ottawa being the capital of Canada. So it really, you know, the Pequocanaghan, which is located in proximity, they want this, they support this, this is the nation that supports this project because they want their jobs, but at the same time they're indigenous people and this is their territory and they very much connect their identity to the notion that

this is where they come from, you know, this is their land. And many of them still live in the bush. Like one of them we interviewed has lived for five months under the tent in Northern Canada. You can imagine what this is like. And they live with hunting and fishing, et cetera. And each family has, they call it a...

a family line where they go hunting. So we wanted to do interviews in the fall and we couldn't because everyone was hunting. So it's really interesting to discover how they combine their very light involvement in the formal economy with a lot of subsistence living still. So this nuclear waste disposal is just next to Loiseau Rock, which is an Algonquin sacred site. And this will be compared to another

indigenous group which is where my research assistant one of our graduate students at Harvard comes from she comes from the Marina Island which is a thousand miles south of Japan and it's next to the island of Guam so you have Saipan and Tinian there and Tinian is very important because this is where the planes that were carrying the Hiroshima bomb and the Nagasaki bomb took off

And Guam is where the military bases of the American government are located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So if ever we have, you know, war with North Korea or China, this is where the, you know, the...

the attack will come from, but they're in the process. The status of these Northern Mariana Islands is that they are owned by the U.S., so the U.S. military can build military bases there, which they're in the process of doing. So these are boats that were in front of my hotel during the month I spent there, and these boats carry all the equipment needed to build a...

a military base within 72 hours in case of attack and they are now in the process of creating these diverted military airfields that would assist Guam. So all this is destroying nature but you have the same story as for the Algonquins which is that they want the jobs and but they also want to defend the environment so it's really a you know pull and push around these these principles of you know

recognition that are very much at odds with each other. So we have hypotheses about how this works for the various groups and what we know so far, 30 of the interviews have been conducted in the Northern Mariana Islands

And for them, joining the military is very much a path to upward mobility. And they embrace consumption. And they want to be American citizens. So their commitment to defending the environment is pretty low in relation to the goal of social inclusion through consumption. Whereas in Canada, the interviews we've conducted so far-- it's only 10-- they very much talk about settler colonialism and all the things that

the crown that settlers have done to them. So we are really interested in analyzing, we call it groupness, how each of the group thinks of itself as a group and that's where we can compare the Algonquin and the Chamorros, the name of the indigenous people in

the Northern Mariana Islands and the US workers in terms of how much do they define their identity in contrast to other groups and what kind of repertoires they draw on to claim recognition. So you can see a little bit where the project is heading. This of course is way too

sociological to present in the book for a general audience. So I think that will probably end up being in articles. But I'm thinking of writing the book as a travelogue because I must tell you that the book has been quite an adventure so far. And I'm thinking it could be interesting for me to try another style of writing where I would talk about the process of discovering these various worlds and

being exposed to how these various populations think about recognition. So I think I will stop here. I've already talked for too long, but I thank you for your attention and I want to acknowledge the role of the other collaborators in this project, which includes Hilary Pilkington, who teaches at UMass, at University of Manchester here, and who's an expert on

European youth and extremism. We're very, very lucky to have her because she really has spent a lot of time studying this. And Andrew Miles was also trained as a historian and who's very interested in the question of place, identity, and class and who's done a lot of collaboration with Mike Savage on the Great British Class Project, et cetera, as well as the various interviewers. So I think I'll stop here and we can exchange about the project. Thank you.

Fantastic and perfectly on time. We have exactly half an hour. I just wanted to just pose a couple of questions to you before we open up, Michelle. So I was maybe one from each side of the talk. So I was really interested in this, the work you did talking to sort of cultural producers and

comedians, which is actually what my PhD was about, but this idea of kind of the way in which those people can be kind of entrepreneurs for dispersing ideas about recognition that challenge some of those forms of stigmatisation. I was just wondering if you felt that was whether there is still the capacity for those people

to have that kind of an influence when from some of the evidence I'm reading

increasingly this sense that even sort of forms of popular culture that perhaps would have been the place where lots of different types of groups tune in to kind of have entertainment about the social world that might inform their sense of the social world even that popular culture is now being organised in political or consumed in politically partisan ways I'm thinking of a paper by Clayton Childress and Craig Rawlings where they look at

the ways in which, in the US anyway, these kind of basic forms of popular culture now are organized into these really partisan dimensions. I'm interested in also whether we might see that in the UK too, but whether, if that is the case, that undermines the capacity

for people to be reaching those audiences with those kind of destigmatizing dimensions? Sure. It's a great question. Yeah, the filter bubbles we know are being accentuated by social media, right? As we tune in with the people who reinforce like

I may listen to Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart, but not to the right wing equivalent. So yes, but at the same time, like Conan O'Brien, who received last week the Mark Twain Medal at the Kennedy Center

and I was listening to a podcast today about the ceremony where he's someone who's always careful to not be too openly critical of Trump. So you end up having these figures who are kind of borderline, who are trying to create the bridge and, um,

I'm thinking also of Campbell Bell, who is a black man who would certainly denounce racism all the time, but he's married with a white woman. And when I interviewed him for the book, he said, I'm trying to be this reasonable middle class black person who's not too scary to white people. And I'm trying to help them understand what the experience of racism is for a reasonable black man.

So you have also like these intermediary people I think who are trying to create bridges. So not everyone is Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Yes, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, that's interesting. Then one just on the second half about what you were finding about this idea of recognition through exclusion.

I mean maybe just these are both maybe questions that are coming from a slightly more pessimistic standpoint but it does seem that a lot of you know that immediately when you mentioned that and you mentioned how much of the qualitative sample in the US kind of you saw in that sense it chimed I suppose with what what a lot of what is written written about the UK that people are kind of

seeking that sense of the we-ness by actively sort of, you know, erecting the symbolic boundary to those who they're not. And I just wondered whether you feel what you, you know, beyond obviously Trump, are you concerned that that sort of recognition through exclusion in its various forms is on the increase more generally? It's been. Yeah.

You think about how systematically Trump has been courting these young men, 18 to 30, who really have made a huge difference. I have a slide showing what proportion of them have voted for Trump. It's very gendered because the women have not. But there's over 50% of the young women who have college degree, whereas for young men it's 38.

there's no question i think it's but it's also both age graded and gender graded so now more young men vote for this you know recognition through exclusion but i think we also have to understand how it's connected with their own experience of precarity like the fact that during the election biden kept saying well all these noble laureates of economics are telling us that the economy is doing great while

the people we interviewed were really, really struggling. So there was a kind of blindness for the Democratic Party to what was happening at the ground level, which I think is an extremely serious problem. And now there's a movement toward economic populism within the

Democratic Party where people are kind of backing off from you know identity politics to say no we just have to go back to strict you know making economic argument for the working class if we want to regain it so we will see what happened okay so let's open to questions from the audience so we'll take some questions from the

personal audience first and then we might have some questions from online if you could say your name and affiliation and keep your question short and as a question if possible so do you want a striped shirt first if you could just wait for the mic to come my name is Renata and I'm a graduate student at the economic sociology program here and my question is you mentioned the gender divide

on the political ideology spectrum and recently in the German elections it was, I think, a fascinating piece of data that people under 30, how divided they were, like young women were disproportionately voting for the far left, whereas young men were disproportionately voting for the far right. This phenomenon has been

seen in other countries as well. And at the same time, the number of relationships at this age group are also declining. And I was wondering what can we do so that young women and young men see each other again? That's a great question. Should we just take a couple more if that's all right? Yeah. Yes, and then one at the back there. Another mic.

Hi, I'm David. I'm in the PhD Sociology. I was really curious about just some of the focusing on the Anishinaabe context. I'm from Canada myself. Oh, good for you. And...

I wonder about these ideas of recognition with indigenous communities. Recognition is a very enlightenment, humanist kind of concept, I'm thinking. And a lot of the environmental indigenous struggles are prefaced around more of a flat ontological thinking of recognition for the non-humans.

that animals are worth preserving, that ecologies are worth preserving, and kind of that also maybe in the context, just thinking of to dehumanize has often been to animalize. And I just was kind of curious how maybe those themes are emerging in that work and how you're interacting with it. Thank you. Just one more, Michelle. Oh, no, sorry. Kristen, did you? Sorry.

Hi, Kristen Zarek. I'm in the sociology department. I was wondering, and this may be somewhat emergent, but I'm asking in part because you've been in the U.S. for the past couple of months. So in thinking of the work that you've been doing and the role of narratives of hope, these have also been given in the context of people who have been in the

global hegemonic power and it's been in power in that position for several decades now. And what's been quite interesting since January 20th is that there's been a lot of questioning, both certainly from outside of the US, but to some degrees within some sectors within the US about

what that role of, or what that position of being at the global hegemon, whether it's as secure as it has been in the past. And I'm wondering in particular what that might have in terms of impacts on these narratives of hope. And it's interesting in terms of the global comparisons that you've been, you know, beginning to work on at least now because, you know, there's probably something to some extent that's universal. But I'm wondering to what degree these narratives of hope become facilitated by

You know, the particular way that American empire and American hegemony has been done over the past, you know, decades if not centuries in terms of, you know, the American dream and these sorts of things as well, and given the potential shift in that configuration, what kind of impacts that might have, if any at all. I mean, that could be wrong that being in the American empire has an impact in terms of narratives of hope as well.

The first question, the gender divide, young women and young men not being on the same planet, I think the two groups have reacted, at least in the US, very differently to DEI with many young men feeling like they were left

since they didn't qualify for, you know, they felt, I think, that the meritocratic idea was really being violated, which is partly what is feeding their support for

When you think recent stats show that something like 30% of the Gen Z women are bisexual now. So I think if you add the experience of, you know, well, the denunciation of sexual violence and the narrative, feminist narrative, although it's a generation among young women that don't necessarily define themselves as strongly feminist, they very much feel like...

Some of the scripts of, what is it called, the masculine script that people like Joe Reagan is promoting is extremely alienating to them. So what can we do to bridge this?

I don't know. I think what I see is that the two groups are very much-- I have twins, or 24. And I witness their culture through their range of friends, which are quite different. And it's hard for me to see how the bridging is going to happen. Although the two of them share a lot of friends, I witness up close how the boys are experiencing their situation very differently than women.

Especially right now because the job market now is absolutely terrible for these young people who are looking for jobs. So we will see. I'm not very hopeful right now about this because of what is coming economically, at least in the American context right now. And I know that the situation for recent college graduates in Europe is also very difficult. So I'm sorry. I'd like to be able to say something else, but...

The recognition for indigenous people, for those of you who don't know, there's a whole movement, for instance, to recognize that this river, the Kishizibi River, is to give it personhood. So it's really kind of very much in line with the kind of Bruno Latour, the agency of the non-human. And for me, so far in the interview, it's not there at all. I think that might be an affectation.

of academics, frankly, because, you know, we have yet to really do interviews with indigenous people who embrace such a perspective. We have to see. I think my student who is in Saipan, she also finds total disconnection with nature.

So I think there's a lot of essentialism about indigenous people and how their identity is deeply connected to nature. And we have to see really how much it resonates with ordinary people. So the literature we're embracing here is about ordinary environmentalism, which is very different than what academics studying environmentalism are into. So vernacular approach to connecting your identity to the environment.

So I don't know, maybe you can give me some indication that this is not, that there's other things happening that I haven't seen yet. The third point about the U.S. hegemony in defining these scripts, you know, I just spent a month in Hong Kong at the University of Hong Kong where, frankly, it's the Chinese dream, you know. It's on extremely...

And we know that the number of Chinese students in the UK has declined dramatically in the context that Yasemin Soysal's work where China is really defining itself as the regional in bringing all the students from East Asia to China to study.

So I think that the model and the aspirations are not... People talk about the Chinese dream just as much as we talk about the American dream. So I'm not sure that it's going to be that qualitatively different, although we're certainly moving toward a more multipolar global ecology. But I don't know that the values that will be promoted are going to be so different. Just behind you first and then second.

Thanks, Michelle. That was really clear, and I think the way you draw out the significance of symbolic work and narrative work is really, really powerful. I've got a couple of, one simpler question and one more focused question around that. One of them is that the boundary work and the symbolic work which you're talking about, the work of the changemakers, that's very skillful work, and the stories being told are quite complex stories.

By contrast, on the right you see these very simple stories. It's all the fault of immigrants or some other category. And the kind of issue is, you have to tell a simple story, a simple progressive story, perhaps, because it just seems to me you're all the time confronted by these basic, very simplistic arguments. And the second one is a bit, I'm sort of slightly unfair in picking your brain a bit, but also I'm a third of the way through this book, we have never been woke, if you read that.

Yeah, yeah. I see it's a gathering interest in the US. I mean, I've only a third of the way through it, and I'm a bit ambivalent about it, but the kind of argument it seems to me he's making is that a lot of the change makers and a lot of the cultural intermediaries who claim to be trying to expand recognition chains, they're actually very strategic, and they're very good at looking after their own careers and their own interests. So in a way, they're kind of

they're creating a backlash, I guess, against themselves because they're behaving in this sort of way. Now, I don't entirely buy it. I think he's onto something, but I'd be interested in your thoughts about that. Yeah. Thank you. Just in the front there. Yeah.

Yeah, thanks so much. My name is Simeone and I'm a grad student in sociology at the University of Cambridge close by. And I would be keen to hear a bit more about your thoughts. You had the slide on kindness or like empathy versus being kind.

And I think that's a topic I'm really interested in also thinking about Pascoe's work on like kind is not enough. And I would be really keen to hear how you think we can distinguish really recognition from these more individualized forms of just being kind, which actually might hide structural inequalities and how it really also plays out in your research that you presented. Hi, thank you so much. I'm one of the MS students of SAM.

I hope I make some justice to the question. My initial question was about your work, but you did mention that there is not many findings to make assumptions and things like that. And the last slide showed some kind of differences in terms of law recognition of class and higher one.

whether you're noticing already some emerging trends of commonality, whether there is some kind of human nature as it's perceived, whether there is something actually exists to human nature that will respond in a similar way. And more basic question, how do we distinguish

a tolerance rather than recognition, where the authentic recognition does happen, and in your view, what does it mean when the authentic recognition happens in terms of like a mere tolerance in that sense? Thank you.

Leave it there so you have a chance and then we'll have some more. There's lots of people who want to ask questions. Yeah, Mike, I agree with your point about complex arguments on the left, simple arguments on the right. I think, let me think, we have a graduate student who has been, let me clarify my thinking here, looking at all the requests from left-wing and right-wing organizations for fundraising and

And the conservatives are just always have a very simple message, and it's about give us money. And they do a lot of ideological work, whereas things are always more complicated for Democrats. And her argument is that the...

Republicans are way more effective in part because it's very simple and it's like let's protect ourselves because we're we should not be sponges. So it's simple. Once you understand that, you understand most of I think what Trump has been doing in the last seven days. Musa El-Grabi's book

We have, we have, what is it? We have, we're not work. We have never been work. I didn't read the published version, but actually I read the dissertation. I was on the dissertation committee for my sense. And to me, the argument is very similar to older work on the new middle class.

Alvin Goldner, and it's, you know, to me the argument of it's all self-serving, it presumes a definition of self-interest that is unreconstructed, like, you know, material self-interest trumps all, which I don't agree with. So I think he's very much motivated by a desire to show that

It's a very self-serving group. I mean, he wrote this book before Trump came to power. Since then, I've seen him publish things that are far more nuanced because I think he's becoming aware that he doesn't want to side with the Trumpians. So he has now to kind of adapt his position. But I think it's going to be complicated for him because bottom line, I think his argument is pretty conservative.

I don't know exactly what is his personal story, but one of the articles I just read said he was kicked out of University of Arizona. So he's being caught in political stuff at an early stage. I don't know.

The kindness versus empathy, I guess I emphasize this in my presentation because I feel like empathy, it's a little bit like, you know, mindfulness or yoga, very individual solutions, which, you know, in some ways that more, if I were to be very critical of my empathy,

argument it would be I'm pushing for structuring our environment. It's a kind of technocratic dream of in engineering an environment where the cultural repertoires we're exposed to are overall overwhelmingly inclusive which then leads to a weakening of group boundaries. But I'm saying it's a bad argument because it's technocratic, you know, it comes as bottom down so that I don't like.

But I don't believe that putting our money on individual

feel good is very effective politically. So that's why this last slide's where saying kindness is not enough, that we really-- if you think in a kind of multi-causal model, you kind of think like if people are often exposed to-- the human nature argument is very pernicious because it presents itself as factual.

And it's just a narrative in my view. So I think I'm trying to move us away from this and also make a strong claim for what sociology has to offer against this argument very much. I'm positioning myself in part against economists with their nudging business and against economists

psychologists with their nudging business to say that there's a lot of things that it's kind of you know sociologists have to offer in our understanding of how constraints operate which are so much more I think accurate and empirically you know convincing then what some of the other disciplines are doing some a little bit of a sociological imperialist which is fine

- Yeah, so I think I have kind of addressed the question about tolerance. Yes, you know, the criticism about tolerance has always been we don't want to be correlated. We want to be fully integrated, right? So the argument about the assimilation of minorities was always no, we don't want to be minorities. We want to be full citizens. So,

I'm not really engaging with this. I think I'm just like advocating for broadening of inclusion in general. So that's more of a discussion. I think that's very salient in political theory, which I think sociologists may not be engaging as much. The conversation I know about these nuances are like Michael Walzer. It's not the kind of thing that, you know, I think just trying to broaden cultural membership in general should be the goal.

Great. I think we've got time for one more round. Do we have any questions online? Okay, fantastic. So we've got lots more in the room. The front row has been waiting very patiently. Thank you. Hi, my name is Byron E. McMahon. I'm an undergraduate at the University of Oregon.

I'm curious, you discuss liberal ideology, especially what the right often considers woke ideology, which is often underscored by the social and factual understandings around structural racism among other aspects. I'm curious when the opposing group often disagrees or completely refuses to acknowledge these structures that underscore liberal beliefs,

whose job does it become to reconcile those differences? And if our goal is to reach a recognition of one another, whose ball is in whose court? Hi, my name is Leo. I'm an undergraduate student.

Excuse me, I'm here at the LSC studying young men in politics, so I appreciate the former question and that was an interesting perspective. But I'll ask a different question in that matter about DEI, just to follow up on your question. Do you think DEI would be more equitable as a identity-based, a class-based, or a mixed-based approach? And do you have any insights on what that may look like?

And just one behind there. Hi, I'm a PhD student here in the sociology department. I'm also working on recognition, but more from the perspective of the state and how the state tries to impose what's worthy, for example, through state honors and medals. I look particularly on the monarchy

to institutions, but I was wondering how often they're in opposition. What I learned today is really about the struggle of recognition and how different actors try to impose their way of seeing who's worthier and who's not worthy. But yeah, I was wondering in your opinion how these more top organizations

Bottom approaches and bottom-up approaches interconnect. Yeah Three minutes Michelle Okay Yeah, the first question is a really tough one how to reconcile the differences And whose job it is to do this. That's how I understood your question, right? I think we can answer that question through a case-by-case

study method to see how it's happening. I think if you think about the destigmatization of people with HIV/AIDS, the pathway that captures the argument of this article is really multi-leveled. So I would approach the question by looking at the process by which it has happened in the past and how it can happen again. That's kind of what I did.

to address this. And I would approach it, you know, there's this huge literature on the construction of social problems and there's a literature on scientific controversy. So I would look at how, you know, different sides of a problem would face each other and how agents of change get mobilized in that context. I know that's a pretty general answer, but I don't have much time.

The second question about DEI and class-based exclusion, absolutely. Like in the interviews with Gen Zs, they talked a lot about sexuality and people of color. They didn't talk at all about class. So clearly very class-blind. And I think that's, you know, the California system has replaced, you know, race affirmative action with, you know, multiple.

class-based, which I think is absolutely, I'm very, very supportive of that. And I think actually with the end of factoring in race in college admission,

that the Supreme Court adopted two years ago. This is exactly what we see now because students can provide a narrative about how the challenges they've encountered has affected their ability to succeed. And that in general tends to be more multi-dimensional than simply checking the box. So I think absolutely from a perspective of social justice, you have to factor in what challenges people have encountered.

And the third one on the monarchy and the metals, that's very interesting. There's this whole literature on the role of the state in the classification of, for instance, immigrant group, refugees. So the role of the state in creating classification system is absolutely crucial.

There's in the literature now a growing number of people who are concerned with how what the state does in creating, for instance, census categories is affected by what's happening in the public sphere. So that would be like one of the frontier areas that are relevant here. So that's how I would think about this, you know, the formal categories interacting with various sources of contestation about these categories.

Okay, I think we are out of time, but just I think we can all thank Michelle for a fantastic lecture. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favourite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.