Date & Time: Friday, March 18, 2022, 5 p.m.
Location: Tempe Mission Palms
The Political History and Leadership program invites the community to a lecture by James A. Lindsay on the postmodern roots of wokeness in education.
Lindsay is an American author, cultural critic and mathematician. With Helen Pluckrose he is the co-author of Cynical Theories, which contrasts the academic approaches of liberalism and postmodernism, and argues that "applied postmodernism" (which focuses on ought rather than is) has displaced other approaches to activism and scholarship. The authors present several academic fields and schools — postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory, intersectionality, fourth-wave feminism, gender studies, fat studies and ableism — and describe how the "applied postmodernism" approach has developed in each field. Pluckrose and Lindsay use capitalization to distinguish between the liberal concept of social justice and the ideological movement of "Social Justice" that they state has reified postmodernism.