The Professor in Your Neighborhood: Lee Bebout with Kathleen Lamp

The Literature Program in the ASU Department of English presents the next installment in its Professor In Your Neighborhood series. Professor Lee Bebout will discuss his new book: "Rules for Reactionaries: How to Maintain Inequality and Stop Social Justice" in conversation with Associate Professor Kathleen Lamp, a specialist in rhetoric.

With this tongue-in-cheek analysis of the communication strategies used to obstruct social justice movements, Bebout lays out how language can be manipulated by those who wish to suppress progressivism and maintain structures of inequality. Taking his readers across the turbulent political landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, he delineates the rhetorical strategies that have long been used to hinder progressive movements. Bebout identifies evasive tactics such as “All Lives Matter” and “Not All Men,” which promote conservative viewpoints and impede calls for change. Discover how this age-old problem keeps rearing its ugly head, and how we can anticipate and identify it in order to disrupt it.

About the presenters

Lee Bebout studies and speaks on issues of race, gender, ethnicity, immigration and politics. In addition to "Rules for Reactionaries," he is the author or editor or three other books, including "Teaching with Tension: Race, Resistance, and Reality in the Classroom" (2019). Bebout teaches in the literature program.

Kathleen Lamp teaches in the Department of English's writing, rhetorics and literacies program. She researches and writes on the history of rhetoric and material culture and is the author of the book "A City of Marble" (2013).