About this item
The Rise of Victimhood Culture offers a framework for understanding recent moral conflicts at U.S. universities, which have bled into society at large. These are not the familiar clashes between liberals and conservatives or the religious and the secular: instead, they are clashes between a new moral culture -- victimhood culture -- and a more traditional culture of dignity. Even as students increasingly demand trigger warnings and "safe spaces," many young people are quick to police the words and deeds of others, who in turn claim that political correctness has run amok. Interestingly, members of both camps often consider themselves victims of the other. In tracking the rise of victimhood culture, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning help to decode an often dizzying cultural milieu, from campus riots over conservative speakers and debates around free speech to the election of Donald Trump.
About the Author
Bradley Campbell was born in 1975 in Columbia, South Carolina, and grew up in nearby Aiken. After graduating from Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, he attended graduate school at Clemson University and then the University of Virginia, where in 2008 he received a Ph.D. in sociology. He is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Los Angeles.
Professor Campbell is broadly interested in moral conflict -- clashes of right and wrong and how they are handled. Most of his work examines violence, and he is the author of the book THE GEOMETRY OF GENOCIDE: A STUDY IN PURE SOCIOLOGY. Recently he has also begun to examine confllicts on modern college campuses. Along with Jason Manning, he is the author of THE RISE OF VICTIMHOOD CULTURE: MICROAGGRESSIONS, SAFE SPACES, AND THE NEW CULTURE WARS, which looks at microaggression complaints, calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces, and the ongoing debate about these phenomena, which can be seen as manifestations of ongoing moral change and the clash of different moral ideals.
For more information, see http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/bradley-campbell
