I’m reading articles published in the late 90s/early 00s, and what’s most striking is how energetic the prose is. Wokeness makes it impossible to tell the truth, but when you read stuff from the not-so-distant past, you see the ill-effects it’s also had on style
articles published in the late 90s/early 00s
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I see this kind of discourse a lot. While I think it peaks and wanes from time to time, and it probably peaked again in 2020, it's been with academia for a very long time. And very salient. EBS's RWR was in the early 00s. Intersectionality was in the 80s, as was multiple jeopardies. Many of the biggest names in this area right now are products are the late 90s and early 00s. Critical theory and its offshoots have had surges building entire schools and departments prior.
What has happened now is it appears to be the first time that we are peaking with peaking with this content and popular level pundits notice. In turn, a particular subsection of academia, often drawing from sociology, has entered into the popular level discourse in an unprecedented way.
Also, it is not as if this is all that is published on. I just scanned the latest issues of our top three journals (by traditional rankings). Race and ethnicity are in a clear minority. Only one approaching being focused on this in Social Forces, where we have the biggest pool, and that particular article is important for European sociology. There's far more on labor markets and economic soc in general.
I think the wokeness complaints are not invalid, but overstated, usually by people who have a limited persepctive on the day to day lives of sociologists.
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Couldn't agree more. Honestly, the further back you go, the more lively the writing.
It's not wokeness, per se, that is causing the problem. It's that the people who go into the field do so with activism in mind. They are not scientists interested in getting to the bottom of a problem. There is a not a mystery they are eager to solve or understand. They believe they already have the answer, and they simply want to use survey data as a cudgel to prove their point, or interview people who will, unsurprisingly say, "Yes, my life sux," so they can then go write about how people's lives suk more than we even knew.
These are people who are looking for careers, not vocations. Academia used to be available to only a select few. Rich people, the children of rich people, etc. They could do anything they wanted with their time, so those who chose academia were truly interested in the life of the mind and associated with others of that ilk. There was a passion there driven by curiosity, interest, and seasoned with a certain level of humility.
Today, for those who can get TT jobs at R1s and SLACs, academia is simply a career. It's a place to pull down middle class wages while doing something respectable. For those who adjunct and work at CCs, it's a place to fight for cultural legitimacy (hence the wokeness) and try to build some power for historically marginalized groups. But the prime mover for this latter group, in particular, is not research. For them, research is tiresome because it's just punching their ticket into the lower ranks of academia. This is why teaching is much more meaningful for this crew.
Sociology is a happy home for marginalized groups because its ethos is: how you are now is because of what happened to you previously. It's a place where you can actively fight for more acceptance by showing that people are not responsible for their own poor outcomes. But looking to escape symbolic violence is not exactly a po
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This was also the peak of the nu metal era. Coincidence?
Just imagine that you had your ASR article accepted on June 11, 2002. You go to Target and purchase "Untouchables" by Ko.Rn and Eminem's "The Eminem Show" which came out last week. You turn on Ko.Rn and just m*$h it out to celebrate your recent ASR publication!!!
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smoking menthol cigarettes!
This was also the peak of the nu metal era. Coincidence?
Just imagine that you had your ASR article accepted on June 11, 2002. You go to Target and purchase "Untouchables" by Ko.Rn and Eminem's "The Eminem Show" which came out last week. You turn on Ko.Rn and just m*$h it out to celebrate your recent ASR publication!!!