Tonight, in London, England, a group of writers and thinkers will gather to debate a key cultural question: “Is woke dead?” And tomorrow, the inaugural conference of a new centre for social science kicks off. Academics will gather to talk through the intellectual origins of this movement and its politics, psychology, and driving interests, to establish it as a field of study, and to delve into overlooked topics and perspectives. Our guest on the program is the man behind both of these events, and he joins us to share his thinking on the post-progressive era — and what it might mean for Canada going forward.

Eric Kaufmann is a Canadian academic and author. He’s a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, and director of its Centre of Heterodox Social Science.

You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

As Tara puts the finishing touches on her next book, on declining trust in the media, we wanted to bring you a few encore interviews that have helped shaped her thinking on the media — including today’s episode.

Since the election win for Donald Trump, we are seeing a renewed sense of scorn for Republican voters in parts of the mainstream media. The Guardian’s Rebecca Solnit, for example, writes in her column that “our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do.” Our guest on today’s program doesn’t see it that way. She’s a lefty Democrat who moved from Park Slope, Brooklyn, to Trump country — and she writes that the gift of living in a rural county is that “I keep finding reasons to see my political adversaries as human.”

Larissa Phillips runs the Honey Hollow farm in upstate New York. She’s the founder of the Volunteer Literacy Project, and her essay for The Free Press is, “Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor.”

You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

As Tara puts the finishing touches on her next book, on declining trust in the media, we wanted to bring you a few encore interviews that have helped shaped her thinking on the media — including today’s episode.

The period often referred to as The Great Awokening is winding down now, and we’re starting to get a better understanding of what happened. My guest on today’s program argues that we have seen these kinds of social justice-styled movements before in American history — and that they are in fact driven by, as he puts it, “frustrated erstwhile elites condemning the social order that failed them and jockeying to secure the position they feel they deserve.”

Musa al-Gharbi is an American sociologist and an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His book is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.

You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com