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We Have Never Been Woke
10:00 - 11:15 am | McCosh Hall, Room 50 | Presented by Musa al-Gharbi

Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite—the symbolic capitalists. In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes. Their dominant ideology is “wokeness” and, while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged.

A powerful critique, We Have Never Been Woke reveals that only by challenging this elite’s self-serving narratives can we hope to address social and economic inequality effectively.

About Musa al-Gharbi

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His research primarily focuses on the political economy of knowledge production and the social life of scholarly and journalistic outputs. He is a columnist for The Guardian, and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and more. al-Gharbi’s first book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, was published by Princeton University Press in October 2024.

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Plenary Session: Normalization
2:00 - 3:15 pm | McCosh Hall, Room 50 | Presented by Betsy Levy Pollack

Presenting her new book project, Professor Paluck will focus on how we can change the unwritten rules of society. The psychological forces of conformity that make people want to “fit in” structure and shape our individual behavior and our modes of interaction in society – but there are ways we can influence them and pull them in a more beneficial direction. How does social gravity work, and what are the strategies at our disposal? In a FASPE context, the related question of how a society can "normalize" problematic normative orientations - and what the role of professionals in that context can and should be - is obviously of particular importance. 

About Betsy Levy Paluck

Two basic ideas motivate Betsy Levy Paluck's research. The first idea is that social psychological theory offers potentially useful tools for changing society in constructive ways. The second idea is that studying attempts to change society is one of the most fruitful ways to develop and assess social psychological theory. Much of her work has focused on prejudice and intergroup conflict reduction, using large-scale field experiments to test theoretically driven interventions.

Through field experiments in Central and Horn of Africa and in the United States, she has examined the impact of mass media and interpersonal communication on tolerant and cooperative behaviors. She finds support for a behavioral change model based on social norms and group influence. To change behavior, she suggests, it may be more fruitful to target citizens' perceptions of typical or desirable behaviors (i.e. social norms) than their knowledge or beliefs. How do social norms and behaviors shift in real-world settings? Some suggestions from her research include peer or role model endorsement, narrative communication, and group discussion. Her work in post-conflict countries has led to related research on political cultural change and on civic education. She is also interested in social scientific methodology—particularly causal inference and behavioral measurement.

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Post-Screening Discussion of Riefenstahl
8:15 - 9:30 pm | Robertson Auditorium | Presented by Andie Tucher and Thorsten Wagner

Andreas Veiel's new documentary about Leni Riefenstahl is the spectacular result of painstaking research in the famous-infamous director's private archives: quotes, letters, newspaper clippings, and recordings of phone calls are combined in highly suggestive ways with interviews and excerpts from her movies. Veiel succeeds in drawing an irritating, intense portrait of an artist and propagandist who never saw her personal morality or professional standards compromised. Covering the broad spectrum of her creativity, from The Blue Light to the "documentaries" of the Nazi era and her postwar work in Africa - the documentary asks painful questions about the complex motivations for complicity.

About Andie Tucher

Andie Tucher, a historian and journalist who has taught at the journalism school since 1998, writes widely on the evolution of conventions of truth-telling in journalism, photography, personal narrative, and other nonfiction forms. She is the author of Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History (Columbia University Press 2022), which has won awards from the ICA, the AEJMC, the Columbia University Press, and Kappa Tau Alpha. Her previous book Happily Sometimes After: Discovering Stories From Twelve Generations of an American Family (UMass 2014) explores stories told by her ancestors as truthful to make sense of their world — stories about kidnaps, murders, changeling children, lost fortunes and how the great-grandmother of Chief Justice John Marshall married Blackbeard by mistake. Tucher is also the author of Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (UNC 1994), which won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians.

She is a 2025 FASPE Journalism Faculty Member.

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