CS 640S

Culture Wars

‘Culture wars’ are ideological struggles over issues seen as outside of political-economic structures: e.g. abortion, sexuality, multiculturalism. These areas of controversy are a war over differing values, beliefs, attitudes etc: i.e. ideological worldviews. We will examine key concepts, including ‘political correctness’, ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, before turning to the origins of culture war discourses in the 1990s. We then examine institutional and organizational support for ‘culture wars’ before focusing on some of the following contemporary examples: ‘The 1619 Project’; anti-‘Critical Race Theory’ campaigns; residential schools and ‘cultural genocide’’; the #MeToo campaign and backlash; ‘Cultural Marxism’; and the anti-trans ideological agenda.