Half the Answer #9: Language, Identity, and Anti-Woke Academic Slander

Caitlin M. Green, Trent R. Nelson, Aris Clemons Apr 24, 2025

Trent and Caitlin talk with Dr. Aris Clemons, an Assistant Professor in Linguistics, about the various slanders and misapprehensions that plague her field of study. We discuss language ideologies, the illusion of objectivity, the futility of being “apolitical” in a political institution, ethnography and lived experience, “other ways of knowing,” and other concepts that get weaponized in attacks on the academy from the right and the center.

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References:

Aris’s book chapter: https://academic.oup.com/book/56269/chapter/445192927

Universities as business entities: https://jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gk07xz?turn_away=true

Science and subjectivity are compatible: https://iaphs.org/sciences-objectivity-conundrum/

A brief history of measurement: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-objectivity/

James Watson was no master of objectivity: https://vox.com/2019/1/15/18182530/james-watson-racist

Research has always been political: https://bioethicstoday.org/blog/the-folly-of-apolitical-science/

“Apolitical” science treated humans like objects https://thoughtco.com/u-s-governments-role-sterilizing-women-of-color-2834600

“Institutional Neutrality” https://chronicle.com/article/institutional-neutrality-is-censorship-by-another-name

Published in: Half the Answer, Podcast

Authors

Caitlin Green is a linguist specializing in Discourse Studies and Pragmatics. She lives in California with her husband, two daughters, and a very small black cat.

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Trent R. Nelson is a poet, historian, and philosopher, as well as a political and socioeconomic analyst. He is the managing editor for MWF Springfield and a contributing editor with Liberal Currents.

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Aris Moreno Clemons is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.

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