The Book of Woke, Ep. 2: Critical Hermeneutics

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Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2025

⏱️ 79 minutes

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 164 What is the Woke worldview? It's called "critical constructivism." How is it adopted? The formal name for picking up "Wokeness" is adopting "critical hermeneutics." What in the world does that mean? It means viewing the world through lenses of power as described by critical theory and social constructivism. That is, it means reading Marxian analysis into all perceptions of the world and believing this makes you more "enlightened." In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay takes you through another segment of what he calls "The Book of Woke," i.e., Critical Constructivism: A Primer (https://amzn.to/3EuM2mZ ), by Joe L. Kincheloe, a (late) critical education theorist. Join him to have all these questions answered and to clarify your thinking about what "Woke" means even more. This episode is Part 2 in a developing series exploring "The Book of Woke." Find Part 1 here: https://newdiscourses.com/2025/04/the-book-of-woke-introducing-critical-constructivism/ New book! The Queering of the American Child: https://queeringbook.com/ Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2025 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #hermeneutics

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, it's James Lindsay, you're listening to the new Discourses podcast, and we are back
0:25.6	into the Book of Woke. I don't have to give a long preamble this time. I think we can just jump in.
0:31.9	These are going to be kind of shorter episodes, but I think I'm going to end up going through
0:34.6	kind of a lot of this. I'm not going to go, however, in order if you guys are hunting down the book.
0:40.1	I heard from a couple of people who found it in their university libraries, and that's exciting.
0:44.9	So I'm glad some people are looking at it.
0:47.6	Again, the book that I call The Book of Woke is Critical Constructivism by Joe Kinchelow.
0:54.3	I encourage you to go back and listen to the first episode in this series at the least.
1:01.2	There will be more later, I guess, so it's the only one right now, to orient yourself.
1:05.6	But the quick, quick summary is this book, Critical Constructivism A Primer, which is in the Peter Lang
1:11.7	Primer series by Joe L. Kinchelow, published in 2005, is the book I consider to be
1:18.7	the book of Woke. I introduced it in the previous episode by saying a while back, I did a podcast
1:25.4	about a book called Is Everyone Really Equal by Robin
1:30.2	DeAngelo and Osam Sinsui. And I called that book, Woke for Dummies. And it's like the baby
1:38.4	intro, you know, you're majoring in something woke. So you're probably, you know, a low
1:44.0	ACT score or something in college and it's
1:47.9	your introduction to woke thinking and this book is the grown-up version um this book when i first
1:54.0	the introduction i gave before was when i first came across the idea of critical constructivist
1:58.7	epistemology on wikipedia which does not have its own entry.
2:02.5	I don't remember which entry it's on.
2:03.9	I haven't bothered to look.
2:04.8	And I read through this bullet point list of the principles of critical constructivism
	...

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