Michèle Lamont

This is a good introduction to social justice and its importance, couched in today's polarized environment. Lamont brings to the US a much-needed sociological lens to what is typically analysed purely through an economic lens, showing how this is too limited; for this she does a good job.
However, her book is muddled: Is it descriptive? if so, it has a clear bias toward "progressive" agendas and down plays reactive forces. Is it prescriptive? if so, the solutions are so wildly broad that it's difficult to understand how it all starts and how to apply her approach to smaller contexts. "Changing the narrative" is bland and hardly novel.
I'm happy I read it as a way to coalesce some of my thoughts but I'm not sure I'd recommend it.… (more)

Sadly overpromising title! This book is about how academics responsible for making fellowship grants think, and while this clearly has implications for broader issues it wasn’t what I was hoping for. Lamont documents differences by field in terms of how reviewers characterize excellence and the role of subjectivity—anthropologists are the most anxious about disciplinary issues, political scientists/economists least—and finds very little overt consideration of racial or socioeconomic diversity; diversity among fields and institutions tends to be much more important to reviewers. Theoretically rich, but not what I wanted to read.… (more)