{"id":41861,"date":"2018-01-20T03:00:45","date_gmt":"2018-01-20T08:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=41861"},"modified":"2018-05-07T10:34:19","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T14:34:19","slug":"lindsay-shepherd-discovered-that-not-only-are-critiques-of-social-justice-not-taught-they-arent-even-to-be-acknowledged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/01\/20\/lindsay-shepherd-discovered-that-not-only-are-critiques-of-social-justice-not-taught-they-arent-even-to-be-acknowledged\/","title":{"rendered":"Lindsay Shepherd discovered &#8220;that not only are critiques of social justice not taught, they aren\u2019t even to be acknowledged&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <em>Quillette<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/quillette.com\/2018\/01\/17\/jordan-b-peterson-critical-theory-new-bourgeoisie\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Uri Harris<\/a> writes about the trainwreck Jordan B. Peterson interview on UK Channel 4 with Cathy Newman, where Newman appeared to be unable to engage with his arguments, as though she was previously unaware of their existence. Harris also briefly touches on the background to the WLU kerfuffle with Lindsay Shepherd which I think explains a lot about how that incident was triggered:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>When Lindsay Shepherd <a href=\"http:\/\/quillette.com\/2017\/11\/21\/wilfrid-laurier-creep-critical-theory\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">was reprimanded<\/a> last year by three Wilfrid Laurier faculty members for showing her class a video clip from a televised debate on gender pronouns, Shepherd\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wlu.ca\/news\/spotlights\/2017\/nov\/open-letter-to-my-ta-lindsay-shepherd.html\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">professor Nathan Rambukkana<\/a> wrote an apology drawing attention to his teaching style. He wrote: \u201c[T]here is the question of teaching from a social justice perspective, which my course does attempt to do.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When I contacted Lindsay Shepherd earlier this month, she told me that she didn\u2019t know Rambukkana taught from an explicitly \u201csocial justice\u201d perspective. However, after going through the syllabus, she realised he had talked about it in his Week 2 lecture, and that the reading material that week also mentioned it. Yet even then, she said, she was unaware how loaded the term \u201csocial justice\u201d is and how it often aligns with censorship and one-sidedness. Her response when I asked her whether she recognised various social justice terms was:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>My undergraduate degree is in Communication from Simon Fraser University, and the gist of my program was learning about power; mostly power as it manifests in media and media industries. I was very accustomed to talking about feminism, racism, and oppression. Less so the other terms you mention, which I only became more acquainted with in my graduate degree program, and many of them as a result of the Laurier incident \u2014 i.e. I was unaware of any substantial critique of intersectionality, gender theory, and critical theory, as we were only taught them from the \u201csocial justice perspective.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Shepherd had lots of exposure to a social justice perspective, but only from <em>within the perspective itself<\/em>. She was taught social justice beliefs but had never been taught to critique those beliefs. When she came across a professor who did just that\u2014Jordan Peterson\u2014she found it interesting and new, even while disagreeing with him. (She later came to realise he may have been right about the legislation he was criticising.) So she shared a clip of the debate with her students, and only afterwards did she discover that not only are critiques of social justice not taught, they aren\u2019t even to be acknowledged.<\/p>\n<p>The methodology underpinning much of the social justice perspective is known as <em>critical theory<\/em>. What\u2019s notable about critical theory is that it <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scribd.com\/document\/29449095\/Horkheimer-Traditional-and-Critical-Theory\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">specifically distinguishes itself from \u2018traditional\u2019 theories<\/a> through its emphasis on criticism. This makes the apparent unwillingness of its adherents to engage with criticism themselves especially noteworthy. When you <em>explicitly<\/em> emphasise your criticality and base your theory on a commitment to look beneath appearances and see things as they really are, you don\u2019t get to be selectively critical.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Quillette, Uri Harris writes about the trainwreck Jordan B. Peterson interview on UK Channel 4 with Cathy Newman, where Newman appeared to be unable to engage with his arguments, as though she was previously unaware of their existence. Harris also briefly touches on the background to the WLU kerfuffle with Lindsay Shepherd which I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,79,53],"tags":[86,1204,139,997,764],"class_list":["post-41861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-education","category-politics","tag-criticism","tag-jordanpeterson","tag-psychology","tag-socialjustice","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-aTb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41861"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41862,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41861\/revisions\/41862"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}