It’s Social Sciences Week again, a national program of events to showcase the social sciences to a wide public. Our School of Social Sciences at Monash once again has a great line-up of events, coordinated this time by my excellent colleague Matteo Bonotti.

I have been part of one of these events led by Claire Tanner, Kim Toffoletti and Kiran Pienaar on ‘cancel culture’. It was a real pleasure to join the terrific Jin Lee and Eve Ng (Gwen Bouvier unfortunately couldn’t make it due to a last minite hiccup) on this Zoom webinar panel. We had around 40 people join us from all over the globe, and had a great conversation on how cancel culture shapes young people’s willingness to engage in debate (especially in classrooms), the productive and damaging dimensions of cancel culture, the everyday vernacularisation of cancel culture (via some of my DECRA research), the gendered dimensions of cancel culture, and more.

To coincide with this SSW panel, Claire, Kim, Kiran and I also wrote a short piece for Monash Lens outlining some of our thinking and approach here to a sociology of cancel culture. We called the piece ‘‘Cancelled?’ Beyond reductive approaches to ‘cancel culture’ as bad or good’ and this was led by Claire Tanner.

Here’s the link: https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2023/09/04/1386105/cancelled-beyond-reductive-approaches-to-cancel-culture-as-bad-or-good