Interview, Newsletter, Uncategorized

Interview with Musa al-Gharbi

By Manning Zhang

We had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Musa al-Gharbi, the author of the widely acclaimed We Have Never Been Woke, a book that has sparked conversations both in the U.S. and around the world. Dr. al-Gharbi, a sociologist by training, and an Assistant Professor of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University, connected with Manning Zhang, our student editor from Brandeis University, for an insightful discussion on his book, and his unique academic journey.

Manning: Before we delve into your book, could you tell us a bit about yourself, and the research you are doing? How did you come to write this book?

al-Gharbi: There are two stories I could tell. One about my broader intellectual trajectory, one a little more proximal to the time of writing. I’ll quickly tick through both:

As I talk about a little bit on my website, my initial plan in life was to be a Catholic priest. And then I had this crisis of faith, and I became an atheist for a while, during this time I started studying philosophy as a way of exploring questions like “What’s the nature of reality? Or, “What is the meaning of life?” But without the God stuff. At the time I thought politics was kind of dumb—that it was people getting distracted by the little things, while I was focused on the “big” things. But then my twin brother perished in Afghanistan while serving in the army. In the aftermath of that tragedy, and as I worked through it myself, and helped my family work through it, I realized that politics and these other social questions were more important than I thought, and were important in different ways than I appreciated at first. When I was transferring from the community college, I only applied to philosophy programs, so I enrolled in the nearest one at the University of Arizona, and I shifted my focus from metaphysics to applied social epistemology – “What do we know?” “In virtue of what?” – with a particular focus on the Middle East and foreign policy, to try to help other families avoid the same kind of tragedy as my family experienced.

Gradually my interest in knowledge, and how we produce knowledge together, kept expanding. For instance, when the Black Lives Matter movement broke out in the United States, I became really interested in whether—and to what extent—the framework and data I had collected on social movements and state responses in the Middle East might also apply to the U.S. So I started to study race, policing and social movements. Later, I noticed this epistemic bubble around Trump’s prospects in the 2016 election: the experts seemed to be striking an extreme posture with a high level of confidence and near-total unanimity. I found this interesting as a person who studies knowledge. After the election, I was distressed because very little seemed to have been learned from one of the largest collective prediction failures in contemporary history – instead, the primary focus was on pathologizing voters for delivering this unexpected result. And this got me interested more in U.S. political elections. 
 
Eventually, these questions evolve into who produces knowledge and what the social life of knowledge outputs. One way to understand the project of We Have Never Been Woke is as an exploration of the political economy of the knowledge professions from the interwar period through the present.
 
But there’s another type of story I could tell about how I came into this line of research that is more narrow, and I tell that story in the introduction of the book:  I moved from being a shoe salesman in a small town in Arizona to being an Ivy League intellectual in the Upper West side of Manhattan, and it was a cultural whiplash. The transition really challenged a lot of my previous assumptions about how social problems come about and persist, who benefits from them, and how. I had gone to New York, largely accepting what you might call a “banal liberal” view of social problems. If you had asked me who’s to blame for whatever problem, I would have said, “those damn Republicans” and,  “the millionaires and the billionaires,”  and I would have assumed those groups to be largely coextensive. But as I started looking at the social milieu in which I was enmeshed, I started seeing all of these problems that couldn’t plausibly be attributed to the preferred stories that I had in my mind. And so that pushed me to think about what I was observing more deeply, and implanted these questions that started to haunt me – questions I spell out in the introduction to the book. 
 
Manning: It’s great to hear you talk about these stories in person…well, synchronously since we are at Zoom. It feels vivid. Now, as planned, I will dive into a couple of book-specific questions, in a Q&A format. The first question is pretty general: How do you feel about having such a highly publicized book? It’s not very usual for a sociologist in the United States.

al-Gharbi: Yeah, yeah [laugh]. As I discuss a bit in Chapter 4, most academic books, even relatively good-selling ones, tend to move only a few hundred units. So this is a very different kind of book for an academic press. It’s been great but a little overwhelming. I did a lot of stage-setting in the lead-up to the book to help ensure it had a solid impact – and I was well-positioned to do this because of all my media experience and connections. And I also had a whole team of people help me through the launch period. My literary agent negotiated with the press to get two dedicated publicists for the book: one focused on the US and one focused on international markets. And I have a booking agent who helps secure talks, negotiate the fees, and sort out the logistics. Still, despite all of the prep work and support, it’s kind of hard to know how a book’s going to be received. Going into the release, both myself and Princeton University Press had a lot of uncertainty about what the reception would be like. I tried to put that out of my mind and just produce the best work I could. But it’s been really gratifying over the last six months to see the book received largely in the spirit that it was intended. The reviews are overwhelmingly positive – in prestige media outlets, book forums, left-aligned venues, you name it. Mother Jones even listed it as one of the best books of 2024. 
 
I think, in part, people are more ready for the message now than they might have been a few years ago. If this book had come out in 2020 or 2021, maybe the reception would have been different because we would have still been in the throes of the latest “Great Awokening” which seems to have peaked in late 2021. Then, especially after the 2024 election and Donald Trump’s reelection, I think many people became more hungry to understand how we got here—what went wrong and where things might be going next. Leading up to the election, both the press and I were concerned that, no matter how it turned out, people might have bigger issues to deal with after the election than discussing the themes of this book, even though there are a lot of important implications of the book for understanding U.S. politics.. But it’s turned out that a lot of people have used the book to try to make sense of the electoral result. So that’s also been a boon for the book and its reception.
 
Manning: You mentioned that you have two publicists—one working in the United States and another helping you explore markets outside the U.S. Do you have any plans to translate this book for international audiences? Is that part of the plan?
 
al-Gharbi: Yep. The book already has sold the rights to be translated into simplified Chinese. And I’m doing an international book tour this summer, thanks to support from the Open Society Foundation. I’ll be spending about a month in the UK starting in May, and then another 6 weeks or so in Australia and New Zealand. I’ll have some talks in Canada and other places and there might be more international stops as the tour continues to build out. In the meantime, I’ve done lots of interviews about the book for newspapers in non-English speaking markets. 
 
Manning: Fascinating. When I read your book, I noticed that you intentionally avoided providing a definition of the term “Woke” at the beginning. Instead, you offered an intriguing explanation. Given that you mentioned the book will be translated into Simplified Chinese and potentially other languages, are you concerned that readers from non-U.S. cultures might feel confused if a clear definition isn’t provided?
 
al-Gharbi: Yeah, as I explain in the book and reiterated on my Substack, I think people overfocus on definitions in a way that often makes things less clear, not more clear. In lieu of a definition, the book provides a lot of historical context around the word “woke.” It explores the trajectory of other words that have served a similar discursive function in the past, and so on. I think that context will also work well in translation, and maybe even better in translation than if I’d tried to produce an idiosyncratic definition.  But anytime you’re doing a translation across languages, there is always the risk of some bits not coming through quite right or getting misunderstood. A lot of the early work by Foucault and Bourdieu, for instance, had early translations that led people to develop erroneous understandings of what those thinkers were arguing, and later revisions were made as a result of subsequent translations. This may be unavoidable to some level. But what I tried to do is provide this thick texture about how different stakeholders understand “woke,” and I hope that at least will be able to translate across linguistic boundaries.

Manning: I noticed that from time to time you use the word we to address symbolic capitalists. Also, in the introduction, you mention that We Have Never Been Woke is a work by a symbolic capitalist, about symbolic capitalists, and primarily for symbolic capitalists. Can I understand this as your intentional reflexivity in your writing? And how do you view yourself and your position in writing this book?
 
al-Gharbi: Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely an intentional move towards reflexivity, which I think is very important. Some of the people I draw on most heavily for this book, like Bruno Latour—of course, the title comes from his book We Have Never Been Modern—and as I detail in the introduction, Latour tells the story about how the modern narratives we “moderns” tell ourselves about how we distinct from others… these stories actually obscure the nature of the modern world and make it difficult for us to understand and address its problems of modernity. In a similar way, I argue that the stories symbolic capitalists often tell stories about being allies to the marginalized and disadvantaged, being on the right side of history, and so on, and these narratives obscure how many social problems come about, persist, who benefits from them, and how.
 
Pierre Bourdieu also strongly advocated for reflexivity, like Latour. They’re very different scholars in many ways, with importantly different projects. But one area where they agree is the importance of reflexivity. So, as much as possible, I tried not just to encourage this, but to embody it myself. One thing I’ve mentioned in interviews, and might be worth emphasizing here, is that in an important sense, this book is a physical embodiment of some of the things it explains and criticizes. 
 
For instance, one of the things it critiques is the growing use of credentials—especially elite credentials—to determine which voices are worth taking seriously. Who we engage with, and who we don’t. But I also went out of my way to target Princeton University Press – a prestige university press – because I knew that publishing it here would lead to a different credibility for the work, and would enhance my job prospects. And part of the reason Princeton was interested in this proposal was because I was coming from Columbia University. If I had submitted the same manuscript as a PhD student at the University of North Dakota, it probably wouldn’t have received the same attention, if any at all. 
 
Likewise, the book criticizes how people leverage collective identities for their own individual benefit. But here, again, part of what was appealing to Princeton about this book project is that it was composed by a Black Muslim author who is a columnist for The Guardian, etc. It’s not that all Black authors get an automatic greenlight from Princeton. They didn’t just publish me because I’m Black. But I suspect that if I had written the exact same book as a cisgender, heterosexual white male—especially if I had any hint of conservatism or Christianity about me – it would have been a lot less appealing to Princeton. The book would have been perceived as too risky, and they probably would have subjected me to numerous sensitive readers, among other things. And the public reception of the book probably would have been a lot different too. 
 
I was given a lot more freedom, and the book was more appealing due to my racial and ethnic identity, despite the book’s criticisms of these very tendencies within the knowledge professions – to systematically accord people different privileges and credibility on the basis of factors like gender, race, and sexuality. Instead of downplaying or avoiding this tension, I think it’s important to lean into it and be honest and upfront about how I, myself, and this work, are both products of many of the dynamics explored in the text. I spent some time on this in the book itself, in a section called He Who Lives by the Sword in Chapter 5. But it’s a fine line between reflexivity and narcissism, so I also tried to be really judicious about turning the lens to myself, and mostly just made a point to include myself in collective statements about symbolic capitalists.

Manning: In academia, as you say, we encounter and, in many ways, embody symbolic capitalism in our everyday lives. So, how can we refrain from engaging in that? Is it even possible in the future?
 
al-Gharbi: Yeah, I mean, structurally, academics simply are symbolic capitalists. The way we make a living is by what we know, who we know, and how we’re known. In other words, we make a living by cultivating and leveraging symbolic capital, both on behalf of ourselves and others. I think that’s unavoidable for us as academics: so long as we continue to do the job as it has historically and conventionally been understood, we will continue to be symbolic capitalists. 
 
But I think the core of your question is: Is there a way to do this work that better represents the social justice commitments we espouse? I tried to avoid giving advice in the book, in part because it felt like a non sequitur. Princeton actually wanted me to end the book with something like “12 steps to effective social justice advocacy” or “5 policies to implement.” But I thought it was a non-sequitur – to spend 300 pages exploring the history and political economy of the symbolic professions, and then wrap it up with a self-help guide. More importantly, I was apprehensive about suggesting that there are easy solutions to the problems the book addresses—especially solutions that wouldn’t require us to make radical changes in the way we live and work.
 
Another reason I avoided giving advice is that there’s this tendency, particularly for those who have the right demographic background, to push public intellectuals into the role of being a “secular priest for anxious liberals.” I really didn’t want to occupy that role. In fact, in some public events I’ve done, I’ve seen an appetite for that, where people respond in a somewhat hostile way when I frustrate their expectation that I should provide them with easy answers on how to live a good life or what they should do next. 
 
I do think these are important questions. If the book raises these questions for readers, I think that’s healthy. However, I believe the people best equipped to wrestle with and answer these questions are the readers themselves. They’re the ones who need to figure out what the implications of the book are for their own communities, institutions, circumstances, lives, and lifestyles. I wanted readers to wrestle with those questions themselves.

Manning: Are you ever afraid of being misread? 
 
al-Gharbi: I mean, before the book was released, this was definitely a concern – both for me and for the press. There were all these culture war screeds about wokeness and similar issues, and for people who hadn’t read the book, it would be easy for them to make strong assumptions about what the book’s argument was and where it fits into the broader cultural landscape. Now that the book is out and people can consult the text, I think some of those initial confusions have largely disappeared among those who’ve read it, and as a result of the warm reception the work has received from critics. So, that’s been a relief, as it’s allowed for a more nuanced understanding of the book’s arguments, and more fruitful engagement.
 
Manning: How have other sociologists, and perhaps not just sociologists but social scientists in general, responded to your book? Of course, there are positive reviews, but what are some of the major critiques as well?
 
al-Gharbi: The reception of the book in the field of sociology has been interesting so far. My job market experience, for example, wasn’t great. I came from Columbia University with a non-traditional academic background. I’m Black. I’m Muslim. I had nine peer-reviewed publications at the time (more today). And I had a book under contract with a prestige university press. One might assume that I would have breezed through the market—but that wasn’t the case. I went on the market three times before ultimately landing a well-remunerated tenure-line job at an R1 research university. However, notice, that my position is not in the field of sociology—I’m an assistant professor of communication and journalism at Stony Brook University.
 
Doing job talks about this book was quite wild. Before the book came out, it was clear that a lot of hiring committees and other stakeholders in the field were apprehensive about how the project would be received. They couldn’t read the book yet, so there was a lot of wild speculation about its contents. There was a real skittishness about whether the book would be a black mark on Princeton University Press and, by extension, any department that hired me. In fact, academics as a group tend to be quite conformist and risk-averse, and sociologists are no exception. We may even be worse in some ways, due to the ideological and political insularity of the field.

Now that the book is out, however, the reception has been much warmer, both critically and commercially. If I were to go on the market now, I think I’d have a different experience. The reception in the discipline has been pretty positive. I did an interview with Contexts, the ASA’s public-facing magazine, and apparently, when you add up all the traffic sources, it ended up being the most consumed interview they’ve ever done so far.  I’ll be doing a talk at ASA this year for the History and Sociology of Social Thought section. And this interview in the Culture section. I get kind messages all the time from sociology faculty and grad students who read the book, via email and social media. Sociologists have helped organize some of my talks, and attend them in high numbers with very positive remarks after.   
 
So, the reception within the discipline, after the release, has been very warm. People now see that it’s not a culture war tract. It provides language and conceptual tools that help contextualize the activism since 2010, as well as the current period of backlash. I symmetrically analyze both anti-woke and conservative symbolic capitalists, showing how they have similar motives, dispositions, and ways of participating in politics. This has led to the book being embraced much more now that it’s out. Unfortunately, I had to go on the market before the book was available for everyone to read, so I had a rather interesting experience looking for a job in sociology while touting this, now widely-celebrated, book.
 
Manning: Such a unique journey for a prolific grad student writer on the job market…
al-Gharbi: Well, this project was unusual in that it wasn’t originally going to be my dissertation. I was working on a different dissertation, a quantitative project studying public attitudes toward race-targeted assistance programs like affirmative action. That project also had some really cool theoretical and empirical contributions. Initially, I planned to do both my original dissertation and the book, but my advisors suggested I shouldn’t try to juggle both. They advised me to make the book my dissertation instead, and I’m glad I followed that advice. The department accepted it retroactively as my dissertation.
 
This worked out really well because it meant I got two rounds of peer review. First, I had a peer review from the press. Sometimes when a publisher is committed to a title, they softball the reviews. For me, because this is my first book, a lot was riding on it. And I really didn’t want to have some obvious thing that I missed that everyone drags me for on the internet post-release. I wanted to make sure it got a thorough vetting pre-publication, so I urged them to send it to some reviewers who would give me the business, and to their credit, that’s what they did. And it improved the manuscript a lot.  
 
And then, I also had my dissertation committee review the work after. In addition to my local committee members—Peter Bearman, Andreas Wimmer, and Shamus Khan—we also brought in social movement scholars Fabio Rojas alongside Michelle Lamont from Harvard. Michelle published a great book called Seeing Others, which deals with how symbolic gestures actually can matter (under the right circumstances). We reached out to her because we knew our arguments intersected interestingly with my own, and to her credit, she not only joined the committee but also provided incredibly generous and thorough feedback. She meticulously went through the manuscript, suggesting better phrasing, pointing out potential weaknesses, and offering thought-provoking questions. It really made the book a lot stronger.
 
This process of having two waves of peer review—first from the press and then from my dissertation committee—made the work much more robust. It was invaluable to have such detailed, constructive feedback, and I think the book really benefited from being retroactively accepted as my dissertation in this way.
 
Manning: I just want to make sure I understand it correctly. You mentioned that your main dissertation project was a quantitative one on public attitudes. Did you continue with that project, or did you fully switch gears to focus on the book project?
 
al-Gharbi: I had to fully shift gears. When I first pitched the book to Princeton, I told them I could give them the manuscript in six months. But then it ended up taking almost three years [laugh]. I had never written a book before, so I didn’t fully realize how different it is from writing a series of articles. In order to develop the argument over hundreds of pages, have the reader follow you across these different sections, while remaining accessible and compelling throughout so they keep reading – it’s just a totally different beast. So, I had to put all my other projects on hold, which wasn’t my plan. But now that the book is out, I might return to those other projects before I go full blast on writing the next book.
 
Manning: What do you think about the discourse around the professional-managerial class, especially the rising assumption that the professional-managerial class is hypocritical and harmful to politics?
 
al-Gharbi: One of the things I had planned to explore more in the book was how people have tried to conceptualize the group I call “symbolic capitalists.” They’ve also been referred to as the creative class, professional managerial class, and so on. I produced a section on this for the book, but Princeton decided I couldn’t include a literature review, so it was cut. I later published a version of that content on my Substack.
 
Regarding hypocrisy, I do touch on this point in the book, but I’ll reiterate here: I don’t find hypocrisy interesting analytically, not at all. As I mentioned in the introduction, if you believe in something, you’re essentially a hypocrite and for several reasons. Moral principles tend to be austere, categorical, and unchanging while the world we navigate is full of ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity, contingency, and dynamism. All of us are born into circumstances that are not of our own making and not fully within our control. As agents, we are fallible in our judgments and limited in our powers. To accomplish big things, we typically have to collaborate with others, which often requires compromises. As a result of these and other factors, our lives and societies are often out of synch with our aspirations and professions. That isn’t something unusual, it’s not a unique characteristic of any particular belief system. It’s the nature of belief given the kinds of agents we are. So I don’t find hypocrisy per se to be particularly interesting. What I emphasize in the book is that this gap between what symbolic capitalists profess and what we do is practically consequential. Because we’re elites, the ways we behave matter a lot for others – especially for working-class people, less affluent people, non-white people, religious and sexual minorities, and so on. There are practical consequences when we don’t live up to our values, and I think those consequences are worth understanding and trying to address. But the hypocrisy itself? Not interested.
 
Now, regarding the professional-managerial class and its negative influence on politics, one point I made after the election—and in multiple essays before the election, but especially after—was that there’s substantial evidence showing how symbolic capitalists have heavily consolidated into the Democratic Party. This has transformed the party’s messaging, platform, and priorities, alienating other groups, particularly the people we consider ourselves as champions of —working-class people, less affluent people, non-white people, religious minorities, et al. These groups have been defecting from the Democratic Party, even as symbolic capitalists have become more entrenched within it. What’s clear is that this defection is due to alienation from the Democrats, not because of any unique features of Trump. The attrition began before Trump and will likely continue after him unless changes are made. What’s interesting is that this alienating nature of the ways we think and talk about politics—has been a consistent feature of the symbolic professions for about a century.        
 
Another essay I published on my Substack is a review of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, written almost a century ago in the UK. It explores how many symbolic capitalists view themselves as allies to workers, but in reality, we are far removed from ordinary working people in terms of values, preferences, and priorities. When we actually encounter the people we consider our champions, we often recoil in horror and try to micromanage or censor them. In turn, they respond negatively by aligning with political parties opposite to ours. This has been a longstanding feature of the symbolic professions for roughly a century, and it gets exacerbated during periods of “Awokening.”
 
Manning: You’ve been sharing links to your Substack blogs along with our conversation [laugh]. How do you manage to maintain your academic publications while also publishing so much on the side? How do you view writing op-eds? How important is that in your academic life, and how do you balance writing for different platforms? Why do you choose to do that? Sorry, it’s a long question!
 
al-Gharbi: Yeah, so one thing you’ll notice in a lot of academic departments is the assumption that public writing is a distraction from scholarly work. But when I went on the job market, I already had nine peer-reviewed publications, and now I have even more, including a recent co-authored article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, plus a book under contract with Princeton. So my public-facing writing hasn’t meaningfully interfered with my scholarly publishing. Part of the reason for that is that I try to make all my work pull in the same direction. 
 
For instance, I often use public writing to test ideas. Here, there are two great features of public writing: First, you get instant feedback. Writing an academic article takes months—six months to write, another six months to get your first revise-and-resubmit, and then even after acceptance, it’s months before publication, and longer still before you start to see what if any, response you get from colleagues in other peer-reviewed publications. But with public writing, you put something out, and you get reactions immediately. That allows you to explore ideas and refine them much faster. Second, writing for a more general audience forces clarity. You can’t hide behind vague academic language; you have to be direct precise and concise. That process helps expose gaps in my own thinking, revealing areas I haven’t thought through enough.
 
I also use public writing as a stepping stone to journal articles. I’ll explore a theme across multiple essays and then realize there’s a larger argument that an op-ed or even a series of op-eds can’t fully develop—so I turn it into a scholarly article. It works the other way, too. After publishing an academic paper, I often use public-facing writing to explore its implications and applications in ways the original piece couldn’t. Public writing also helps drive attention and citations for my research. For example, my recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper on censorship and self-censorship in science was accompanied by several op-eds in different outlets. Those articles explored themes that didn’t fit within the paper’s scope and also helped generate more visibility and engagement for the research itself.
 
My third book is actually going to be about public sociology. It’ll be part how-to guide and part synthesis of research on why public engagement is so important. Many academic departments still see public-facing work as a distraction, but when you look at the data, the research that gets translated for the public and policymakers often has a much bigger impact on the trajectory of a field than the most-cited articles at any given moment. If you compare what’s most discussed in public discourse to what’s most cited in academic literature, the public-facing work tends to have more influence—because policymakers, funders, and even students considering entering a field engage with those ideas first. They’re not combing through American Sociological Review archives; they see sociologists in The New York Times or The Washington Post and get a sense of what the discipline is about. That shapes who enters the field, what they work on, and how sociology interacts with adjacent disciplines.
 
There’s a lot of research showing that colloquial science—scientific work translated for a broader audience—plays a crucial role in shaping academic fields. In some cases, it has a bigger impact than narrowly focusing on publishing in top-tier journals and accumulating citations. But academia is still catching up to this reality. So my third book will help bridge that gap by synthesizing the evidence and offering practical guidance on how to engage in public scholarship effectively.

Manning: Since op-eds and blog posts reach a broader, often non-academic audience, do you actively engage in conversations with those readers? Or still mainly with symbolic capitalists, in your words?
 
al-Gharbi: Unfortunately, this wasn’t always the case, but today, as I discuss in a section, A Tempest in a Teapot, in Chapter 4 of my book, the primary readers of news articles tend to be demographically similar to the people who produce the news. This makes it difficult to use platforms like The New York Times to reach non-symbolic capitalists, as symbolic capitalists remain the primary audience. While public writing allows you to engage with people outside your specific field—such as policymakers and academics in other disciplines—most mainstream media outlets still cater to symbolic capitalists. 
 
Some non-symbolic capitalists do read The New York Times and The Washington Post, so there are occasional opportunities to reach them. However, engaging with non-symbolic capitalists effectively requires different methods. For instance, I have given talks at RV parks for senior citizens and spoken at churches. Local news outlets are another important channel—when non-symbolic capitalists do read newspapers, they are more likely to engage with local news than elite publications like The Atlantic. I try to use these other channels when possible, but when it comes to writing for mainstream media, I am mostly engaging with other symbolic capitalists—just those outside of sociology or my specific subfield. That kind of engagement is still valuable but in a different way.
 
Manning: Could you brief us about your second and third books? Are they still related to symbolic capitalism?
 
al-Gharbi: My second book will still be on this topic. When I initially pitched We Have Never Been Woke to Princeton, the plan was to dedicate half the book to analyzing symbolic capitalists—our communities, institutions, and the ways we leverage social justice discourse in struggles over resources, status, power, and opportunities. In the latter half, I intended to shift the analytic lens and examine the elites and the “normie” constituents who are increasingly defining themselves against us and growing mistrustful. This includes people whose work is tied to physical goods and services, those living in small towns and rural areas, individuals with lower levels of education or income, religious communities, and ethnic minorities. I planned to explore the causes and consequences of the growing sociological distance between these groups and symbolic capitalists, as well as how this distance prevents “us” from understanding their concerns.
 
The second half of the book was going to argue that issues often treated as separate—such as rising inequality, tensions around identity politics, and the rise of so-called populist leaders like Trump—are, in fact, interconnected. They are all part of the same overarching story: the widening divide between symbolic capitalists and much of the rest of society. I originally wrote the book as intended and submitted it to Princeton, but at 200,000 words [laugh], it was too long. As a result, the manuscript was split in half, with the first part reworked to function as a standalone book—this became We Have Never Been Woke. The second half, which offers a symmetrical analysis of these other stakeholders, is currently being revised into its own independent book. It will likely be titled Those People. An official announcement should be forthcoming, as we plan to begin shopping it to publishers in the next few weeks.
 
Manning: And the third book is a very different project.
 
al-Gharbi: Yeah. It’s in part because a lot of people ask me for advice on how to do public writing, and I train people on this a lot—both now as a professor of communication and journalism, but even before that. I served for a while, for instance, as the managing editor for an academic consortium that brought together students who were combat veterans with students from war-affected regions to study conflict together. In that role, I also helped people edit and place their work. Later, for Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit where I was a communications director for a time, I also helped people edit and place their work and led writing groups to help scholars learn how to do this. There’s a lot of interest in this—people are always asking me for advice. I provide some on my website. But I figured, why not produce a more robust resource for this? A book on public sociology would be relevant for both sociology and journalism – again, tying my interests together.  
 
More substantively, one of the big contributions of the third book is that public-facing work is not just important for increasing the impact of our research and helping others understand its value. It’s also intellectually important for shaping the trajectory of fields in ways people don’t yet fully recognize. Another major impact I hope the third book will have is pushing more departments to take public-facing work more seriously and to consider integrating it more fully into hiring and tenure decisions. Right now, this kind of work is often seen as a sideshow—something “nice,” but ultimately a distraction. I want to shake that up and show that the public impact of a work probably matters more than, say, citations, for understanding the long-term contribution of a scholar to a field. 
 
Manning: Because you mentioned in the book that you draw on the sociology of culture theory and also compare and contrast it with Bruno Latour’s theory—what drew you to this specific approach in the sociology of culture? Especially since this interview is for the ASA Culture section, how has sociological culture influenced your thinking about the specific empirical case you’re studying? I’ll start there, and then I can follow up with other questions.
 
al-Gharbi: Yeah, I mean, in some ways, I came to Bourdieu through Weber as a kind of starting point. Drawing from scholars like Latour, Michael Polanyi, and others, I was generally interested in discussing people’s behaviors in a way that doesn’t reduce everything to crass materialism. I think Weber is particularly helpful here for a couple of reasons. 

First, he is reflexive—he encourages scholars to apply their own frameworks to themselves. In Politics as a Vocation, he has a great line that I included in the book, which runs, “In truth—let’s be honest with ourselves here—this belief in the cause, as subjectively sincere as it may be, is almost always a ‘moral legitimation’ for the desire for power, revenge, booty, and benefits: the materialist interpretation of history too is no hansom cab to be hailed at will, and it doesn’t stop for the agents of revolution! But then, after the emotional revolution, comes the return to traditional everyday life; the hero of the believers, and even the belief itself, disappears or becomes even more effective as a conventional slogan in the political philistine’s or functionary’s arsenal.” Too often, scholars operate under what Andrew Abbott calls “knowledge alienation.” We can readily recognize that others are influenced by all sorts of biases, prejudices, limitations, and interests, but we tend to analyze our own beliefs and behaviors in a completely different way than we do others’. Weber’s work in general provides one of the earliest and most generative disciplinary critiques of these tendencies. 
 
Beyond that, Weber is useful because of a key innovation he made over Marx—he widened the lens of how we understand and talk about interests. Instead of defining interests purely in materialist and individualistic terms, he emphasized that ideal interests also play a crucial role in motivating our behaviors. People are often willing to sacrifice material priorities in pursuit of ideal interests.
 
Weber’s ideas were particularly helpful in getting me to think about status, class, power, and a broader understanding of interests beyond material concerns. Bourdieu builds on Weber in interesting and generative ways. In fact, Rogers Brubaker has a lovely essay on the relationship between their work, showing how Bourdieu makes important innovations in Weberian thought, drawing heavily from him in ways that aren’t always fully appreciated.
 
What I found especially useful about Bourdieu was his notion of symbolic capital, which provides a more specific and processual account of how distinctions arise and how change happens. I was reading Homo Academicus just as the current period of what I call the Great Awokening was unfolding post-2010. In Homo Academicus, which examines the second Great Awokening in France, Bourdieu describes how academics aligned themselves with social justice movements while simultaneously using these commitments in struggles over power and status. Reading this in the context of our current moment led me to consider whether this period might also be a case of something larger—an idea my later empirical research validated.
 
At one point, I even considered using a different term—symbolic revolutions—instead of Great Awokenings to describe these periods of rapid shifts in how people talk and think about social justice. In his book on Manet, Bourdieu introduces the idea of symbolic revolutions and explores why they happen. His explanation isn’t far from mine—it rhymes, though my story takes a somewhat different approach. He also argues, for instance, that elite crises, including elite overproduction, are key predictors and drivers of these symbolic revolutions.
 
One significant innovation my work offers beyond Bourdieu is that, while he tended to focus on specific fields—Homo Academicus, for example, examines academia, Manet examines art—I am able to look across multiple fields simultaneously. With the data and tools available to me that weren’t available to Bourdieu, I can show that these symbolic shifts aren’t just occurring in academia but also in the arts, journalism, entertainment, and corporate HR departments—all at the same time. Moreover, I can demonstrate that the simultaneous nature of these shifts is itself a case of something. When Bourdieu was writing, there had only been one prior Great Awokening; when I was writing, we were in the fourth. Having twice as many cases allows me to ask and answer a different set of questions than Bourdieu could, using different methods and tools. This broader scope lets me contribute something new to the conversation beyond what Bourdieu laid out in his work.
 
Manning: That’s very interesting. As a methodological question, would you say that a key strength of your research is your ability to use ongoing empirical material as evidence to support the theories you propose?
 
al-Gharbi: I definitely engage with historical research as well. For example, the second chapter of my book takes a cross-historical approach, tracing over a century of these patterns to establish that they constitute a distinct case of something. I go all the way back to the late 19th century, when symbolic professions first emerged, and follow developments through to the present. To build this argument, I use a mix of methods. Some of it involves quantitative analysis of large datasets, but I also rely heavily on historical sources and narratives. For instance, when examining the student protest movements of the 1920s, I incorporate direct quotes from students and contemporary accounts of how these movements were perceived, drawing from various historical materials.
 
Manning: How does your approach to culture shape your choice of research topics, settings, and methods?
 
al-Gharbi: I really like that question because I’m really interested in how people come to their research topics. Michael Polanyi has this book called Personal Knowledge, where one of the things he stresses is that academics aren’t randomly assigned their objects of research. We don’t enter a lottery or something—we choose them. And we often gravitate towards the particular questions and methods we do as a result of all these really interesting factors. Often, there are interesting stories behind what led me to particular questions. I’ve shared some of those in different places. For instance, in my paper on Islamic social science, which examines the relationship between regimes of knowledge about society and regimes of power within societies, I did an article and interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education where I discussed how that project came about. Similarly, for my work on how scholars often misperceive and misrepresent Trump voters and their motives, I’ve done interviews explaining the origins of that research.

In terms of methods and theories, I’m really eclectic. I have a BA in Middle Eastern Studies, and a master’s in philosophy. I’ve taught political science, earned a PhD in sociology, and now I’m in a school of communication and journalism. Outside of my home department, I was mentored by a social psychologist and I’ve co-authored with other psychologists. I work on a broad range of topics—including foreign policy, historical social science, and political analysis. The common thread uniting my work is a focus on questions like: What do we know? How is knowledge produced? How do we form a shared understanding of reality? What is the social life of knowledge outputs? When I come across a specific puzzle or research question, I think carefully about which tools will give me the best leverage to address it. Because of my interdisciplinary background, I have a wide range of theoretical and methodological tools at my disposal, and I alternate between them systematically to make forward progress on issues of concern.
 
You can see this in We Have Never Been Woke. The book pulls together a lot of the quantitative empirical work I’ve done by myself and colleagues. It also has a chapter dedicated to historical analysis. It incorporates insights from cognitive and behavioral sciences. It engages deeply with economics and political science. The approach I take depends on the nature of the question I’m investigating. 
 
One method I haven’t explored much yet—but I’m very interested in—is ethnography. I have a few projects in mind for the future, once I finish my next two books. I think ethnography can offer a powerful lens into social phenomena, especially when combined with other methods. My advisor, Shamus Khan, co-edited a book on ethnography, and his own work demonstrates how ethnographic insights can be integrated with other approaches to powerfully illuminate society. Mario Small is another scholar who does this really well—he puts ethnographic findings into conversation with other types of data to reveal aspects of social life that might otherwise be overlooked. It’s definitely something I’d like to explore further down the line.
 
Manning: Such openness to methods—you don’t seem to hold any hierarchical views about them.
 
al-Gharbi: Yeah, I don’t—I guess I don’t… yeah, I don’t. I’m interested in learning from whoever I can, from whoever seems to have something to teach me. I’m less concerned with which box it fits into or which discipline it belongs to. Now, of course, this has probably created some challenges for me on the job market, since a lot of departments prefer candidates they can neatly categorize—someone who studies one specific thing and clearly fits a particular departmental need. For someone who works across multiple areas, this presents certain risks and challenges in terms of how my work is perceived by colleagues. But at the end of the day, I’m committed to pursuing the questions that interest me, using whatever methods provide the best leverage. I want to do the kind of work that excites me, and I let the other stuff sort itself out downstream. 
 
Manning: How do you envision the future of cultural sociology—or the sociology of culture? And what excites you most about where the field is headed?
 
al-Gharbi: I think there are two developments that excite me. One is that there seems to be more interest in things like morality and religion. Morality was a central focus of early sociology—many early sociologists focused on the important role that morality plays in defining a culture, who belongs to it, who doesn’t, and on what basis. The study of morality became somewhat passé for a while when Talcott Parsons became unfashionable for political and theoretical reasons. But now, there’s kind of a revival of interest in morality, and religion too. Sociology was founded on the study of religion—Weber argued that you can’t even understand modernity without understanding key religious shifts. Durkheim saw religion as a crucial source of social cohesion. But as Samuel Perry and others have shown, the study of religion has become more marginal in sociology today. Many sociologists seem to hold the view that the only reason you would study religion—this transhistorical, global phenomenon that influences everything from family formation to political behavior—is if you are religious yourself, engaged in “me-search” or apologetics by another means, or if you hold religiously conservative views – and in a field where conservatism is taboo, scholars’ assumed association of the study of religion with conservativism has further marginalized the field. However, there are signs of a revived interest in both morality and religion, and is something I find exciting.
 
The second thing that excites me is the emerging new tools that allow us to ask different questions. Even throughout my own career—which isn’t that long, as this is only my second year as an assistant professor—I’ve seen major changes. Five years ago, my colleagues and I were excited that we could publish papers analyzing tens of thousands of articles spanning multiple decades from various media outlets. At the time, this was cutting-edge work. Now, just five years later, I’ve done projects with collaborators where we’ve analyzed tens of millions of news articles across a 50-year period. The ability to work with such massive datasets allows us to draw conclusions with a statistical power that would’ve been impossible before, and to uncover historical trends and contemporary associations in ways that weren’t possible before. This shift has been supported in part by the open science movement, which encourages researchers to make datasets and repositories more widely available, to share their code, etc. And it’s enabled in part by new computational tools. I often collaborate with a computer scientist, David Rozado, to get leverage on some of these really ambitious data projects. Now, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT might make some of this work even more accessible even for people who aren’t buddies with computer scientists… although you should make friends with them anyway. They’re nice people!
 
Manning: You seem to be really positive about these data tools.
 
al-Gharbi: Yeah. Of course, LLMs have their own issues—they hallucinate sources, they often summarize things strangely, their use raises complex ethical concerns about authorship and intellectual property, and they experience model collapse when trying to produce “original” content based on other LLM-generated content. We shouldn’t be too Pollyanna-ish about these tools. But for research like some of the work I’ve published, focused on detecting patterns in large corpora, LLMs are really well-suited for the job. That’s what they were designed to do. You still need a strong foundation in coding, statistics, and relevant scholarly literature to properly interpret, verify, and describe outputs, but the barriers to entry are much lower. And they can enable a wider range of scholars to ask different kinds of questions about cultural outputs – bigger questions—than we’ve been able to before. And I think that’s really exciting.
 
Manning: I’d like to wrap up: I read your interview with Duncan Moench from 2021, where he suggested you should pursue a nonprofit job over elite academia, but you insisted on staying. Four years later, do you have a different answer to that question?
 
al-Gharbi: Yeah, I think pursuing a professorship was definitely the better choice. As jobs go, it’s hard to beat the life of an academic. We complain about higher ed all the time, but people compete so intensely for these jobs for a reason. To be a tenure-line professor at an R1 research university is truly a charmed existence. Even the things people hate about academia tend to have significant virtues. For instance, while there’s plenty to criticize about peer review when it works, it really does enhance the quality of people’s work. The fact that I sometimes color outside the lines likely subjects my work to more scrutiny than others. However, rather than whining about bias, I think it’s ultimately beneficial in sharpening my thinking and research to be subjected to this pushback. If anything, I think the bigger issue is that some people, when confirming views others want to hear, might not face as much scrutiny as they should. 

As I explained in a recent podcast, you can see the value of being in academia by looking at the work of people who leave academia—often, the quality of their work starts to suffer because they’re no longer held to the same accountability standards. And they tend to be subject to various forms of audience capture over time. So, no, I don’t regret my choice. Despite the many deep faults in institutions of higher learning, staying in academia has been incredibly valuable for my thinking in addition to being a plum job. When these structures work, they truly strengthen the work we do.