Post-Progressivism?: Toward a New Social Science

Heterodox Social Science Inaugural Conference

We are entering a post-progressive era in which sixty years of cultural left intellectual hegemony is in question. Populism, polarization, progressive illiberalism and the fraying of social capital have produced an intellectual crisis and loss of confidence in our progressive-dominated meaning-making institutions. Traditional leftists, classical liberals and conservatives have all rendered pointed critiques of the cultural left episteme. A shift away from ‘woke’ excess is evident in new media, social media and even established media and organizations, but is being steadfastly resisted in academia.

Even so, academic research is vital for building theories which frame, organize and systematize smaller-scale insights from think tanks, the media and empirical scholars. We need high theory and intellectual depth alongside analysis and commentary. This requires networks, conferences, journals, associations, canonical texts, graduate programmes and courses. This conference is both an intellectual and an organizational endeavour.

The conference addresses a major problem: our knowledge-production system is heavily swayed by its cultural left weltanschauung, directing attention to progressive topics and viewpoints while using carrots and sticks to constrain the pursuit of truth. As a result, today’s social science conceals as much as it reveals about the world.

The conference’s intellectual aims are twofold: a) to institutionalize the study of woke, arguably a dominant high-cultural ideology of our episteme; and b) to research omitted topics and perspectives, rebalancing social scientific knowledge.

We need a New Social Science for an emerging post-progressive era.

Plenary and parallel sessions will bring heterodox scholars together to debate and collaborate, with the aim of institutionalizing alternative social science.

The conference is about conferring, but also about focused results. The event will be recorded and disseminated online. It will produce a special issue of an academic journal and an edited book on post-progressive social science.

We will discuss strategies for networking, funding, publishing and supporting the careers of heterodox social science scholars. We will debate the Buckingham Manifesto, a countercultural vision for a politically-neutral social science.

Themes will include, but are not limited to, the following:

Critical Woke Studies

  • The intellectual origins of woke: Protestant, liberal, neo-Marxist or postmodernist?
  • Are woke ideas downstream of equality law, or are laws and institutions downstream of culture?
  • Is woke a result of self-interest (dividing workers, status distinction via ‘luxury beliefs’) or genuine belief?
  • Bottom-up versus top-down – the sociology of woke: did beliefs spread epidemiologically through the media and social media, or a via a more deliberate ‘march through the institutions’?
  • The politics of woke: how important is the culture war for deciding elections? Can public policy roll it back?
  • The psychology of woke: how important is hyperparenting, fragility, therapeutic concept creep, psychopathology and personal victimhood in spurring the rise of this ideology?
  • The political theory of woke. Is there a case for limiting speech, mandating equal outcomes or deconstructing a majority tradition?

 

Neglected Perspectives in the Social Sciences

    • Alternative explanations for racial, sexual or gender inequality
    • Positive sociology
    • The effect of diversity on social cohesion and social capital
    • Anomie, sexual orientation and mental health
    • Family structure and social outcomes
    • The effects of DEI on minorities, majorities and organizational performance
    • Anti-conservative/male/white/Asian discrimination in elite institutions
    • Attitudes to free speech and objective truth
    • Correlates of left-wing authoritarianism
    • Distortion in the public understanding of historical events
    • The social construction of trauma and harm
    • The social construction of systemic discrimination
    • The social construction of disinformation and hate speech
    • Negative effects of low-skilled immigration
    • Innumeracy and police violence
    • The effects of heredity/evolutionary psychology on social behaviour
    • How can we reform the social sciences, and the academy more broadly?
      Read the full conference schedule here