Helen Pluckrose | |
|---|---|
 Pluckrose in 2019 | |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | University of East London (B.A.) Queen Mary University of London (M.A.) |
| Occupation(s) | Author, cultural writer |
| Known for | Grievance studies affair |
| Notable work | Cynical Theories (2020) |
Helen Pluckrose is a British author and cultural writer known for critiques of critical theory and social justice [1] and promotion of liberal ethics, most notably in the grievance studies affair. [2] [3] [4] [5]
Pluckrose completed a degree in English literature at the University of East London and a master's degree in early modern studies at Queen Mary University of London, [6] with a particular focus on "the ways in which medieval women negotiated the Christian narrative". [7]
From the age of 17 to 34, Pluckrose worked in social care mostly providing for the personal care needs of elderly people and those with physical and learning disabilities. [8]
Alongside James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, Pluckrose was involved in the 2017–18 grievance studies affair (also referred to as "Sokal Squared" in reference to the 1996 Sokal affair), a project which saw the group submitting a number of bogus academic papers to peer-reviewed journals in cultural, gender, queer and race studies, to see if they would get published. The authors stated their goal as highlighting poor scholarship and eroding criteria in some academic fields, particularly those influenced by postmodern philosophy and critical theory. [9] Despite criticism of the exposé as a "hoax" and "coordinated attack from the right", Pluckrose and her colleagues describe themselves as "left-leaning liberals". [10]
From 2018 to 2021, Pluckrose was editor-in-chief of Areo Magazine, an opinion and analysis digital magazine exploring "a variety of perspectives compatible with broadly liberal and humanist values". [11] [12] She stepped down from this post in April 2021. [13]
In 2020, Pluckrose released a non-fiction book, Cynical Theories , co-authored with James A. Lindsay and published by Pitchstone Publishing.
Pluckrose founded Counterweight as a reaction to the growth of implicit bias training and other forms of what Pluckrose calls "critical social justice ideology" in the workplace. [14] The group describes itself as a "non-partisan, grassroots movement advocating for liberal concepts of social justice". [15] Counterweight launched an online advice service in January 2021, [16] which Pluckrose described as "Citizens Advice for the culture wars". [14] Also labelled as an anti-woke helpline, Pluckrose claims that its main purpose was to cultivate dialogue and resolve conflicts. [17] The group published a video which, according to The Telegraph, argued that "woke" activism unfairly judges people by their gender, race and sex, and pledged to provide resources such as mental health support and "expert guidance". [14] Pluckrose ceased working for Counterweight in 2022 but continues to support the cause. [18]
Pluckrose lives in London with her husband David, a forklift truck driver, and their daughter. [19]
The Sokal affair, additionally known as the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
Queer theory is a field of post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of queer studies and women's studies.
Alan David Sokal is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works with statistical mechanics and combinatorics.
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, first published in French in 1997 as Impostures intellectuelles, is a book by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. As part of the so-called science wars, Sokal and Bricmont criticize postmodernism in academia for the misuse of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing.
The Bogdanov affair was an academic dispute over the legitimacy of the doctoral degrees obtained by French twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanov and a series of theoretical physics papers written by them in order to obtain degrees. The papers were published in reputable scientific journals, and were alleged by their authors to culminate in a theory for describing what occurred before and at the Big Bang.
Feminist geography is a sub-discipline of human geography that applies the theories, methods, and critiques of feminism to the study of the human environment, society, and geographical space. Feminist geography emerged in the 1970s, when members of the women's movement called on academia to include women as both producers and subjects of academic work. Feminist geographers aim to incorporate positions of race, class, ability, and sexuality into the study of geography. The discipline was a target for the hoaxes of the grievance studies affair.
In philosophy, the terms obscurantism and obscurationism identify and describe the anti-intellectual practices of deliberately presenting information in an abstruse and imprecise manner that limits further inquiry and understanding of a subject. The two historical and intellectual denotations of obscurantism are: (1) the deliberate restriction of knowledge — opposition to the dissemination of knowledge; and (2) deliberate obscurity — a recondite style of writing characterized by deliberate vagueness.
The science wars were a series of scholarly and public discussions in the 1990s over the social place of science in making authoritative claims about the world. Encyclopedia.com, citing the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, describes the science wars as the
Sir Paul Roderick Clucas Marshall is a British hedge fund manager and philanthropist. According to the Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, he had an estimated net worth of £630 million. In 2024, he topped The Sunday Times Giving List, having donated £145.1 million over 12 months to various charities.
Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture is a 2008 book by Alan Sokal detailing the history of the Sokal affair in which he submitted an article full of "nonsense" to a journal and was able to get it published.
Criticism of postmodernism is intellectually diverse, reflecting various critical attitudes toward postmodernity, postmodern philosophy, postmodern art, and postmodern architecture. Postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection towards what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism, especially those associated with Enlightenment rationality. Thus, while common targets of postmodern criticism include universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, and social progress, critics of postmodernism often defend such concepts.
Peter Gregory Boghossian is an American philosopher and college professor. Born in Boston, he was an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University for ten years, and his areas of academic focus include atheism, critical thinking, pedagogy, scientific skepticism, and the Socratic method. He is the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, and of How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide.
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography is a peer-reviewed journal published 12 times a year by Taylor & Francis. It is the leading international journal in feminist geography and it aims to provide "a forum for debate in human geography and related disciplines on theoretically-informed research concerned with gender issues".
Woke, the African-American English synonym for the General American English word awake, has since the 1930s or earlier been used to refer to awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans, often in the construction stay woke. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to be used to refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.
Tim Hayward is Professor of Environmental Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and director of the university's Just World Institute, a body set up to "foster interdisciplinary research into the global challenges facing the international order, with particular attention to issues of ethics and justice". Between 1995 and 2017, Hayward published four books on ecological values, human rights and political theory. Hayward has recently received coverage in the mainstream press for his alleged "propaganda" in defence of Putin's Russia and Bashar Assad's Syrian regime.
The intellectual dark web (IDW) is a term used to describe a loose affiliation of academics and social commentators who oppose the perceived influence of left wing–associated identity politics and political correctness in higher education and mass media.
The grievance studies affair was the project of a team of three authors—Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose—to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and erosion of standards in several academic fields. Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals on topics from the field of critical social theory such as cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.
James Stephen Lindsay, known professionally as James A. Lindsay, is an American author. He is known for the grievance studies affair, in which he, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose submitted hoax articles to academic journals in 2017 and 2018 to test scholarship and rigor in several academic fields. Lindsay has written several books including Cynical Theories (2020), which he co-authored with Pluckrose. He has promoted right-wing conspiracy theories such as Cultural Marxism and LGBT grooming conspiracy theories.
Andrew Doyle is a playwright, journalist, and political satirist from Northern Ireland, who has written for the fictional character Jonathan Pie and created the character Titania McGrath.
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody is a nonfiction book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, published in August 2020. The book was listed on the bestsellers lists of Publishers Weekly, USA Today, and the Calgary Herald.
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