About

Michèle Lamont is a cultural sociologist who studies morality, group boundaries, and inequality. She has tackled topics such as dignity, respect, stigma, racism, and how we evaluate social worth across societies in her books. Her research focuses on recognition, dignity, and social worth, examining how these concepts shape social interactions and inequalities.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Environmental resource management
• Environmental ethics
• Geography
• Biology
• Ecology
• Environmental planning
• Economics
• Philosophy
• Virology
• Environmental science
• Law
• Criminology
• Social psychology
• Medicine
• Psychology
• Gender studies
• Business

Selected publications

• Reflections on the Experiences of “Homing”, Cultural Intimacy, and Recognition for the Study of Symbolic Boundaries and Inequality

  Universitaire Pers Leuven eBooks · 2026-04-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• <i>Seeing Others</i> for what?

  Identities · 2025-03-24 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Economic Inequality and Mental Health: Causality, Mechanisms, and Interventions

  Annual Review of Clinical Psychology · 2025-05-07 · 10 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Almost all countries in the world have witnessed a rapid increase in levels of economic inequality, a measure of the distribution of income and wealth across the population, since the advent of neoliberal economic policies in the 1970s. In this review, we conceptualize inequality as an ecological construct and discuss why it matters for the mental health of populations and for individual clinical outcomes. We then discuss some of the key mechanisms through which economic inequality influences mental health beyond poverty itself: social comparison and social capital. We also consider how the effect might vary across specific vulnerable groups in the population, such as young people and minoritized communities. Finally, we discuss methodological challenges in studying the relationship between inequality and mental health and conclude by outlining future research directions and possible interventions at the governmental, community, and individual levels to mitigate the negative mental health consequences of economic inequality.

  PublisherDOI

• Lights, Camera, Activism: Recognition Strategies in Hollywood and Comedy

  Work and Occupations · 2025-04-29 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  Against the background of the #MeToo movement and the national reckoning with American racism, we assess how professionals in two fields of cultural entertainment engage in strategies to promote recognition. We draw on seventy in-depth interviews with creatives working in television production in Hollywood and professional comedy to advance a three-part argument: First, we describe seven distinct recognition work strategies they highlight, which differ in their goals, methods, and intended targets. These are categorized into two types: 1) Narrative Strategies (“sparking thoughts and dialogue,” “reflecting reality,” “Trojan Horse,” and “emotional modulation”); and (2) Power Strategies (“see it to be it,” “redistributing power,” and “creative composition”). Second, we show how interviewees perceive that various constraints limit their capacity to pursue social goals through creative work. Third, we show that their recognition strategies operate in relation to these perceived constraints and how creatives conceptualize their micro-level actions as progressively creating broader changes. Many creatives believe their industry has the ability to transform society in small but cumulative ways; this study shows the ways in which they believe this process works, contributing to the growing literature on occupational activism.

  PublisherDOI

• Is Your DEI Progress Undermined by Attention Inequality?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Feeling overlooked: A rural–urban divide in recognition

  Global Policy · 2024-10-03 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract The farmers' protests sweeping across Europe during the early month of 2024 have highlighted the discontent felt by many residing in rural areas. Protests have been motivated by increasing input costs, falling prices of agricultural produce and more stringent regulations. In this paper, we go beyond the economic rationale for the protests and ask what broader sociological factors could be driving rural discontent. To this aim, we investigate political ‘recognition gaps’ between rural residents and their urban counterparts – that is, the differences in the degree to which people feel respected and recognised by their governments. Using data collected in the spring of 2022 across the 27 Member States of the European Union, we document that a sizeable proportion of the sample perceive a lack of fair treatment and respect from their governments. Notably, these gaps in perceived respect are significantly larger in rural compared to urban areas. The differences in perceived recognition between rural and urban areas hold even after controlling for a wide range of sociodemographic characteristics, showing that it is not just differences in the observable characteristics between rural and urban residents that are driving these different levels of perceived recognition.

  PublisherDOI

• 18 HOW TO PUBLISH, BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, WHY

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2024-04-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This essay responds to an invitation by the editors of Sociologica to write about publication strategy.

  PublisherDOI

• Seeing “Seeing Others” differently

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2024-07-22 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Comments from

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Recreating a Plausible Future: Combining Cultural Repertoires in Unsettled Times

  Sociological Science · 2023-01-01 · 33 citations

  articleOpen access

  This article analyzes how young adults draw on cultural resources to understand their identities, aspirations, and goals when taken-for-granted scripts of success are perceived as less desirable or achievable. Drawing on pragmatism, we propose the concept of 'plausible futures' to capture how people rearrange elements within cultural repertoires as a practical and moral project to define their identities, aspirations, and goals. We draw on interviews with 80 college students concerning how they understand their future aspirations, including how they define personal success and broader social goals, when they face unpredictability in, and dissatisfaction with, achieving dominant meritocratic and socioeconomic ideals. We find that respondents combine elements from four cultural repertoires to work toward and envision their future: the American dream and neoliberalism, the therapeutic culture, ordinary cosmopolitanisms, and a 'Gen Z' cohort narrative. The combining of elements from each repertoire enables a hybrid set of cultural tools that hold to tenets of hard work and self-reliance while accommodating the quest for greater recognition and inclusion. We show that respondents combine cultural elements based on their ability to connect elements to futures perceived as viable and valuable.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How American college students understand social resilience and navigate towards the future during covid and the movement for racial justice

  Social Science & Medicine · 2022 · 38 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Criminology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• African American Responses to Racism and Discrimination

  NSF · $243k · 2007–2010

Frequent coauthors

• Virág Molnár

  New School

  54 shared

• Alan Warde

  28 shared

• Vivien Walsh

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  27 shared

• Ken Green

  Australian National University

  27 shared

• Carole Cohen

  Princeton University

  27 shared

• Andrew McMeekin

  27 shared

• G. M.P. Swann

  27 shared

• Mark Tomlinson

  Providence Health & Services

  27 shared

Awards & honors

• President of the American Sociological Association in 2016
• Elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
• Elected member of the American Philosophical Society
• Elected member of the British Academy
• Elected member of the Royal Society of Canada