To join: Bagels and coffee will be provided, and seats are limited. To register, please send an email to rsvp@humanities.wisc.edu with your name, title, or affiliation.
Faculty, staff, and graduate students are invited to join Musa al-Gharbi for a small-group discussion on the challenges facing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in our current moment and how we can think about DEI frameworks from cultural, intellectual, and policy perspectives. If you attended al-Gharbi’s lecture the previous evening, this “Breakfast Book Talk” is an opportunity to connect in a more intimate, informal setting. We’ll dive deeper into al-Gharbi’s book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, and discuss genuine beliefs, social justice, and the words, ideas, images, and data that we identify with in both personal and professional settings. The event is presented in partnership with the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice.
Note: You are not required to read the book to attend this discussion. However, you can access a preview of the book via Princeton University Press or download a copy from UW-Madison Libraries.
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.
Part of the 2025 Center for the Humanities Civics Lab, these events—supported by the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship & Civil Dialogue (WICCD)—aim to identify key factors and strategies to foster civil dialogue about critical and contentious issues like academic freedom and the role of universities in political life.