Responses to Stigmatization in Comparative Perspective

Multiculturalism and diversity have raised a number of challenges for liberal democracy, not least the stigmatization of people in response to these developments. In this book, leading experts from a range of disciplines look at the responses to stigmatization from the perspectives of ordinary people. They use a range of case studies drawn from the US, Brazil, Canada, France, Israel, South Africa, and Sweden: the first systematic qualitative and cross-national exploration of how diverse minority groups respond to stigmatization in the course of their everyday lives.

The chapters in this book tackle a range of theoretical questions about stigmatization, including how they make sense of their experiences, how they shape subsequent behaviour, and how they negotiate and transform social and symbolic boundaries within a range of social and institutional contexts.

Responses to Stigmatization in Comparative Perspective provides new data and analysis of how stigmatization affects a range of societies, and its original research and analysis will be important reading for those studying Ethnicity, as well as Sociologists, Political Scientists, and Anthropologists. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Michèle Lamont is Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, USA.

Nissim Mizrachi is a Faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in the Gershon H. Gordon Faculty of Social Science at Tel Aviv University, Israel.