Episode 21: Musa al-Gharbi, Social Research and Political Bias Half Hour of Heterodoxy

Show Notes

Musa al-Gharbi is a research associate at Heterodox Academy and a PhD student in sociology at Columbia University. He is a writer whose work has been featured in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and several other venues. The topics of his research include terrorism, extremism, war, antiracism, and, more recently, U.S. political elections.

Selected Quote

So there’s this real problem where in order to move the needle on a lot of the social issues that progressives want to address, they just need to be able to engage with a far larger band of people than we’re training them to engage with. I mean even from the religious standpoint, most Americans are religious and most people, especially outside of the United States – again, if you’re talking about in developing nations, even more religious and in a different way than Western Europeans and Americans often are – and we’re just fundamentally not training social researchers to be able to speak in a religious language or even feel comfortable engaging with religious people or their narratives or frames of reference.

Transcript

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Chris Martin: My guest today is Musa al-Gharbi. He’s a researcher at Heterodox Academy. He’s a PhD student in Sociology at Columbia and he’s a writer whose work has not only been featured on our blog, but also in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic and several other venues. The topics of his research range from terrorism to war to anti-racism and more recently, he has been writing about US political elections. You can find out more about him at his website musaalgharbi.com. So here is Musa al-Gharbi. Welcome to the show.


Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, thank you for having me.


Chris Martin: We’re glad to have you on. On previous episodes, I’ve interviewed professors pretty much uniformly and you’re the first student to be in the interviewee’s chair on this show. I’m curious. Tell me a bit about how you as a graduate student decided to join Heterodox Academy.


Musa al-Gharbi: I had kind of an unusual journey. I mean in academia in general but maybe the Heterodox Academy as well. So I started in community college and a lot of the concerns that we deal with at Heterodox Academy weren’t such a big deal there.

I mean a lot of times at community colleges, you have much more diverse student bodies, even racially and ethnically, but definitely in terms of like socio-economic status and political orientation. But then when I went to University of Arizona, which is where I got my bachelor’s and my master’s degree, I noticed a big shift pretty immediately and it was mainly just that you would see almost all the professors were clearly aligned with the left -- and to the extent that they talked about sort of non-leftist views at all,  a lot of the talk was very uncharitable.

But usually they just excluded frameworks that were not affiliated with the left to begin with. I found that disturbing and irksome often because I myself come from a conservative community and family.  I’m very familiar with conservative thought and I know that conservatives have a lot to add to many of these conversations and I felt like more diverse input would have enriched and enlivened a lot of these conversations.

But still, I mean when I would hear things on the news about like safe spaces and trigger warnings and microaggressions and the like, I always thought that that was – like I didn’t think that any of that stuff was real or particularly salient to anyone’s universi...