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[00:00]
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[00:34]
Dr. Eric Oselva
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[01:19]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Welcome to the
[01:24]
Michael Johnston
hello and welcome. My name is Michael Johnston and I am the host of New Books Network. Today I have Dr. Eric Oselva, professor of sociology at Georgia Southern University to talk about his brand new Fresh off the shelf, Fresh from the printers Contested Reality, Identity Identity Construction in the Culture wars by Degreter, Contemporary degrader and it's part of the contemporary Social sciences section. Welcome to the show, Eric.
[01:53]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Thanks. Thanks for having me, Michael.
[01:55]
Michael Johnston
Excellent. So to start off the conversation, this is a very deep theoretical book. And how did you come about writing about this idea of contested realities and then, well, furthermore, the destigmatization of identity once it's been established through these realities. Right, yeah.
[02:16]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Appreciate you saying that. And I guess I'll start. I mean, I'll start off not at the very, very beginning, but in general in my career I've been fascinated by how people can define the same thing in different ways. So a lot of this for me, and it's not only about me, but what personally drives me is wanting to satisfy a curiosity about all the ways that people can define reality in an experience world. So just maybe Basic humanism. Now, in pursuit of this kind of funneling down and moving along in order to look. The best place to look at where people are defining reality differently is when you have a cultural conflict. So a lot of times we just go about our day and meaning is kind of taken for granted. But it's those moments where we have disagreement over something that matters, where we can really look at the constructive process. So what I've done is I'll take something where people are in a disagreement. So one topic I've covered is immigration. Another is vaccine use. And the place I look for this construction is online discourse. What I like about online discourse is that it's a natural artifact of the thing I truly care about. It's people doing the work of thinking about what's going on and expressing, using ideas about how to define reality. And also, online discourse provides a great deal of variation. So I. What I like is that I can find as many, many different ways of describing the exact same empirical phenomena. So. So that's. That takes me to a career where I look at how people define reality on Reddit, on Facebook, and now. But what brings me specifically to this book is that over time, I saw that I became interested in the fact that people, when they're defining reality, when they're interpreting what's happening with immigration or vaccines or AR15s or whatever the case might be, is that they also are having a conversation about what it means to be a particular type of person. So an important part of this constructive process is constructing identities, constructing, defining, and evaluating the people involved in these controversies, and then also the people who have an opinion of these controversies. So what emerged from all the. From a number of journal articles that I produced over a couple decades, or almost a couple decades, is a general theoretical argument that I thought worked for a book. And that argument is that when people discuss controversial topics, they will inevitably make claims, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, about the type of people who are involved in that controversy. And then an important caveat, addition to that argument is that this will sometimes involve stigmatizing people, but not always. So online conversation is oftentimes publicly understood as being toxic and stigmatizing and vilifying and tribalistic. And it is.
[05:34]
Michael Johnston
But.
[05:34]
Dr. Eric Oselva
But there's also this side of it that is more respectful, more diplomatic that I wanted to call attention to.
[05:41]
Michael Johnston
So kind of a definition of situations like those that are defined as real are real in their consequences. And one of those consequences might be a stigmatization of the person who. Who made such a claim.
[05:53]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, like, probably one of the central points that I want to bring home is that this stigmatization is absolutely a choice. So when we see discourse being stigmatizing, we can see agency in creating this stigma by seeing all the times where people don't create the stigma and don't vilify the people that they're dealing with.
[06:14]
Michael Johnston
And then I see some of the backstage frontstage sort of here as well. And I see Marshall McLuhan. I ran into this quote one time. One thing that a fish most often doesn't observe is the water that they're swimming in. And Marshall McCloon. Yeah. So, like, the identities that these people have and the meanings that they create for themselves might be quite subtle. And they may not even recognize the type of people who they are. I often hear people say that I'm a good person, even if others might not think they are.
[06:41]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the. So in terms of, like, why write a book instead of a journal article? I kind of. I came to a point where I had some things that I thought were useful for a more general book reading audience versus the much more specialized journal reading audience is that instead of making a fairly minute theoretical advance, although I'd like to think I'm making some theoretical advance, I think a book like this helps us to see the water that we're swimming in. So as I go through a number of specific controversies and how people can define people in them, I think people might get a sense of the options that they actually have for how they discuss these things.
[07:22]
Michael Johnston
Yeah. And one of the things that I like most about books is it also gives you an opportunity to air things out and to get more in depth and to give you more room and space to write about it and to think with others, but think with your. With yourself as well, in your own mind as you write this material out. And I think you did a great job at that, and I enjoyed reading what you. What you had to say.
[07:40]
Dr. Eric Oselva
It's good of you say.
[07:42]
Michael Johnston
So one of the things that you mentioned, as we were just briefly talking, is identity and how it is central to your analysis of the meanings that are made and of the realities that are created. Do you see identity as being something primarily rooted in biology or psychology? Or how do you. How do you conceptualize identity? Is it fundamentally a product of socialization?
[08:05]
Dr. Eric Oselva
That's an important question. Identity is many different things, and it takes many different treatments. So if I'm going to say that I'm dealing with identity, I really have to Say what I am and what I'm not doing. So one way of thinking about identity, as you say, is as a psychological property or as a deeply internalized sense of who we are as a result of socialization. And that's not quite what I'm getting at here. And another way of thinking about identity is in terms of our search for authenticity or who we truly are, or relatedly, how we are, what our personal identity is, and that question of how we are different from everybody around us. And again, I'm not going with that either I'm going the version of identity I'm working with or the dimension of identity I'm working with are the source material for that socialization or the cultural ideas about what it means to be a particular type of person. So in this regard, I'm drawing on some particular symbolic interactionists. One in particular is the excellent Susie Scott in her book on identity, where she draws on the late great David Maines, who defines social identity as categories through which people may be located and given meaning. So identity here is ideas about types of people. And then now Susie Scott, where she comes back into it, drawing on that definition, she elaborates that the interactions of which I'm one, we define identity as a process. It's something that's always in a state of emergence, and it emerges through interaction and conversation. So where I come in in this study is that I look at those conversations where identity is being produced. So I find some specific cases. Vaccines, immigration, how people discuss electric electric vehicles, trans youth, care for trans, or health care for trans youth, campus protests in Israel, what to do with AR15s, and then also racialized police violence. And I look at these conversations and I look at the identities that emerge through these conversations or the categorization that emerges through these conversations.
[10:30]
Michael Johnston
So then I. My guess would be that you see identity as being something insitual rather than being a priori or something that existed prior to its performance in these online posts.
[10:45]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Absolutely. So part of the process of identity from, from the perspective I'm working from, is that I'm sure we have some, some essence and some personality and there's some, some, you know, inherent elements to who we are. And identity can be used to capture that. But what I'm thinking of is how we learn to be or how other people, how we learn about how other people think about us. So part of identity is the me or the self as social object that we see ourselves as and that we react to. So it's really in terms of the classic I me dichotomy it's the me side that I'm looking at here.
[11:24]
Michael Johnston
Yeah. So I mean, sophism is a median or Blue Marian approach, right? Yeah. Symbolic interactionism at its heart. Yes. So and then the other thing that really stood out here is the process that you created, a three stage process for each case, beginning with stigma, moving to elevation of that stigma, and then concluding with the stigmatization. And it provided a clear analytical framework that tied all these different chapters together. Because all of these topics, if you may, followed the same process. The content of each stage likely differed, but they followed that same process. Could you tell me more about each of these stages?
[12:07]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, absolutely. So what happens in this? So I mentioned that identities are constructed, but to kind of get into the how of identities are constructed. Now what we. Michelle Lamont and Arlie Hochschild, they've done some important work on how part of what fuels the animosity and the enmity of these, of certain cultural conflicts is the sense of being disrespected. So we can think of that in terms of stigma and stigmatization. That is, with stigma, following Goffman's version of it especially, stigma is an attribute that's discrediting something that basically contaminates one's sense of the purity of oneself. And what we know about the culture wars is that there's a lot of vilification, a lot of treating people as less than or being discredited.
[12:59]
Michael Johnston
Right.
[13:00]
Dr. Eric Oselva
So we've got. And I want to describe that process. So there's the stigmatization of identities in these controversies. So if you're supporting the campus protests of Israel's invasion of Gaza, you will have people saying very negative things about you. And that's the stigmatization part of the process. But where I want to get into, I think my contribution in adding on to this conversation about shame and pride and stigma and public controversies is that I want to detail two other things that happen in terms of building identities up. So Arlie Hochschild, Michel Lamont, they think of this in terms of recognition in respect to identities as a way. And I want to go into a bit more detail. And I say that this recognition process has two elements. So there's two ways of responding to the stigma. One way of responding to the stigma is through elevation. Elevation is the. It's the act of advancing an idea, an identity. It's basically, it's creating a boundary that projects a pristine version of the self. So it's a version of the self that's free of any contamination. Sometimes it's built by bringing other people down, but not always. So that's elevation. Destigmatization is. It's the act of decontaminating an identity. It's the removing of stigma. And really a good. A shorthand that I hope is good for thinking about this distinction I'm trying to make. It's the difference between saying somebody is good versus saying somebody is not bad. Elevation is the act of saying a person identity category is good. And generally, if we're saying somebody's good, we're talking about all the ways, all the values that they're aligned with, all the things that are admirable about them, all the ways of rising them up. If we're thinking about destigmatization is a little different. It's cleaning up an identity. It's saying it's not that bad. It's recognizing negative attributes in stigma, but minimizing them or describing them as something that can be changed or. And so forth. So it's sort of two different processes. So in terms of, like, what this all means for identity is. I think I can demonstrate. I think the book shows that when you look at online discussion of some controversial topic, you're going to see these three stages happening concurrently. You're going to get a. So whatever. Whatever position you take on electric vehicles, they should be subsidized or not. You're going to see some people who stigmatize you for that and say that you're bad at thinking or you have some other negative characteristics which disqualify you from being equal to everybody else. You're also going to see some people who validate your identity and elevate you and describe all the ways that you are correct for having this opinion and that you're a good person for having this opinion. And then there's this third thing that happens where you'll be described as not right, but not a monster either. And that's what I mean by destigmatization. So I think the result is we get this kaleidoscopic image of ourselves reflected back on it. So if we think of Cooley's Looking Glass self, what happens with public controversies is that we get these three versions of self that are rather fractured.
[16:38]
Michael Johnston
Yeah, that's interesting.
[16:39]
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Right?
[16:39]
Michael Johnston
Because I was a conflict manager. It's making me think about that. I was a conflict manager in elementary school. It was like fifth or sixth grade, and there were two versions. There was, you know, I was. I was standing in between as a liaison, and I was supposed to be the rational voice so being able to see the extremes or elevated versions on both sides, and then realizing also that there is a social structure that's in place, that's also temporal. And understanding how identity fits within the socially constructed reality that exists within the culture wars is a very complex. But I think that's exactly what you are butting heads with in this book. Yeah. So what distinguishes elevation from destigmatization? So my understanding of elevation is that if it's music or if it's a sound being measured, elevation is when it kind of the spikes. But destigmatization, how does that happen, how does that occur, and how does it contribute to the broader process of identity construction?
[17:50]
Dr. Eric Oselva
So in addition to identifying these categories, I want to show how they happen. And there are some specific ways that destigmatization is produced. One way of producing destigmatization is what I call boundary avoidance. Boundary avoidance is where you talk about a topic and you don't talk about the identities involved. So to back up, my basic argument is that as we discuss controversial topics, we end up making some statements about what it means to be a person who takes this position or that position. But it's not necess, you don't have to do that. Or it's possible to minimize this identity building process. So you can discuss the AR15 and then just discuss specifically how dangerous it is or is not, or how often it is or is not used in violence. And if you do that, you can focus on the object and you really can spend less effort and give less space to what it means to be a person who feels this way or that way. So boundary avoidance is you really just try and stick to the evidence and stick to what's happening now, not what it means to be a person who thinks this way or that way. So that's one way of doing destigmatization. Another way of doing distinguishation is through rearranging the vocabulary of motives or the motives that we attribute to people or the attributions that we make to people. So one way. So a subform here of destigmatization is what I'll call partial validation. This is where you're having a conversation with somebody and you say, okay, I actually agree with you on X, Y and Z, but I disagree with you on this other position. So that's a pretty common conversational element, bit of rhetoric there. But what I want to call attention to is that when you acknowledge some sort of agreement with somebody who you're disagreeing with, what you're doing is that you're saying that they're a person that is worthy of speaking to, worthy of communicating with somebody who's worthy of being persuaded. Is that making sense?
[20:11]
Michael Johnston
Makes a lot of sense. It's like boundary work that Lamont and others have talked about. It's also the emotional labor that Hochschild talked about in her writings. And it's this concept that I'm working with, the boundary perception. Right. So it's the actual inaction of the, of the perceptions that people have about themselves and their surroundings through the things that they, that they decide to engage with, through the dialogue that they carry out online or face to face. But you focus on the online, the online interaction that's taking, that's occurring. Yeah.
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Dr. Eric Oselva
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[22:10]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Simplisafe Active Guard outdoor protection plan starting at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com licenses for alarm license information. Tennessee 2012 and if I may, there's some other elements of. I could get a little bit more into the details destigmatization. So another, another form is something I call diplomatic accounting. So within sociology, as some of our audience might be aware, some might not, there's a long history of looking at how people explain themselves and give accounts for why they've broken some norm or another, why they shoplifted or why they were late to class. And it's a long literature and there's been less thinking about how we account and give accounts for our adversaries. So one thing I try and show in the book is that there's this form of accounting I'll call diplomatic accounting, where we give acceptable reasons for being wrong or acceptable reasons for being on the other side of a boundary. So if we're talking about vaccines, we can say, okay, you're wrong to be in favor of vaccines, but I can see why you came to this wrong conclusion. Obviously it can go the other way as well. So with diplomatic accounting, you're coming up with acceptable reasons for why somebody would come to an inconclusion an incorrect according to you conclusion. Another element of destigmatization is something I'll call. I call it motive proffering, but it's really just persuasion. It's giving somebody a reason to come to your side, which in doing so, in saying, oh, you haven't thought about this, but if you thought about this, you'd be more in favor of immigration restriction or opening immigration up, either way, but if you thought about this consequence, you'd probably be on my side. So you're giving the act of trying to give somebody a reason to join you is, is destigmatizing. It's saying, all right, there's you're not right now, there's something wrong with you now, but you've got the possibility to change. And kind.
[24:07]
Michael Johnston
I'm laughing kind of because it makes me think of like, well, well, this is use of persuasion, trying to draw people to the other side. It may be still violating a logical fall. It may still be logic violating logical rules.
[24:21]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Absolutely. I'll take the opportunity to maybe say as I do this one inspiration I don't have in the book is to convince people of what they should think about policing or health care or whatever. My job is to show you what people are saying and what what people are saying says about how identities are being made. But I treat, I, I am, I make no comment about whether or not I think somebody is correct in their argument or incorrect in their argument.
[24:56]
Michael Johnston
Oh, I tell people that I'm not a fortune teller. I told my undergraduates An Introduction to Sociology. I'm not going to tell you what is right or wrong. I'm going to tell you what is. And that's all I Can do because that's my discipline. Sociology isn't. Isn't a Magic 8 ball.
[25:09]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm hoping readers are going to. And readers of course are capable of coming to this with their own ideas about what they think is right or wrong. My job is just to show you what happens to people's activities in public discourse.
[25:26]
Michael Johnston
So another question. You talk about this idea of culture wars. How do you define culture wars in the context of this book?
[25:34]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, that's a good question. Because it's something I don't think I. I don't explicitly define it in the book. I leave it open a little bit and I have some reasons for doing this. So in general, I think of culture wars as being situations that involve real disagreement about the morality of some collective or institutional practice. There are going to be situations where something is commonly done that some people find to be perfectly okay and some people will find to be abhorrent. But I don't want to define it more specifically than that for a couple of reasons. One is that I'm not sure that we actually have discrete lines between culture wars versus other types of disagreement. It's probably a continuum. So I treat it as more of you know it when you see it kind of a thing. And the other reason, and I don't want to necessarily try and narrow down those discrete distinctions just yet because I don't want to put the cart before the horse. I think if we define culture wars too specifically, we can. That will take us away from some relevant phenomena. So I want to leave it a little bit open ended. So for instance, what I mean by I don't want to over define it. A lot of times when we study culture wars or think about culture wars, we think of a clash of ideologies between conservatives and liberals, or progressives and people on the right or versus the left. And I think that's absolutely there. When we look at these topics, we can absolutely see people aligning with Democrats, people aligning with Republicans and so on. So that distinction works. But I don't think we want to have an over determined sense of the ideologies that are driving people. Because as everybody recognizes, there's not a lot of necessarily what Philip Converse calls ideological discipline amongst people in their actual everyday lives. There are people who are not perfectly aligned with either ideology or more ideologically heterodox. And if we focus too much on the liberal versus conservative end of it, I mean, there's a good reason for doing that, of course, but I want to be able to capture some of the things that don't work exactly with liberal or conservative or some of the diversity within the conservative side side or diversity within the. The liberal side of things.
[28:09]
Michael Johnston
So I'm thinking of, you know, war makes it sound more severe than cultural disagreements. And I think that there's important in using war rather than disagreement because it's. It's serious clash and people taking it seriously matters in this. In this case.
[28:23]
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[28:24]
New Books Network Announcer
And that.
[28:24]
Michael Johnston
And that's.
[28:24]
Dr. Eric Oselva
That's part of where you get into. I guess some of the difficulty here is that there's a lot, probably a little bit of emotional. There's some variation in terms of people's emotions with regard to these things. So cultural wars can and have involved actual violence and violent outbursts and can also involve, you know, relationship dissolution and that type of a thing. But also it can be pretty low salience for people, too. So, yeah, disagreement is probably the phenomenon I'm interested in, but it can become. But the term culture war is used. So I also will use that to help locate myself within the universe of discourse on this topic. But, yeah, war is. It makes some sense, but it's also problematic as a descriptor.
[29:15]
Michael Johnston
Yeah. But I think it can get into it, and it's not liberal or conservative because it could be something as, I don't know. I say I'm not a huge. I'm a sports fan, but I'm not a fanatic. Which is weird to say that to begin with, because being a sports fan means that I'm a fanatic. Right. Anyway, you know, Cowboys or Eagles or something like coffee. Drinking it black or drinking. Oh, an Eagles fan. Oh, I'm a Cowboys fan. But we get a lot.
[29:44]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yearly. That's. What a nice coincidence.
[29:50]
Michael Johnston
Or a, you know, or drinking your coffee black or with cream. Right. I mean, these are debates that people get into and can become serious during certain times or certain seasons when people see and have these little squibbles about how it should be and ought to be and what those characteristics of people mean about them and who they are, particularly Eagles and Cowboys thing.
[30:17]
Dr. Eric Oselva
And to some extent, I don't want to. I want to be able to capture that sense of. Because not all of these controversies are equally warlike. So of the things that I covered, I would say that the electric vehicles one was the most polite. Now, there was certainly some stigmatization there, and I documented that. So if you like electric vehicles, if you dislike them, you will see reflected back to you validation and stigma and some destigmatization in between. But on the whole. The tenor of that conversation had less vilification and people were more willing to try and focus on how people might disagree with them. And also the. The humanity of how people. Of the people who disagree with them. And then also the empirics of the case. Some other cases were much more emotionally hot, such as the discussion of race and police violence, which.
[31:14]
Michael Johnston
Yeah, but it all matters, right? Yeah, it all matters because one of the things you think about, probably as you're writing this, is Goffman's categories of stigmatization and the ways in which people can fall from glory.
[31:26]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Absolutely. And so part of a goal of this type of work is besides the culture war, is to refine our vocabulary for stigma. Because on the one hand, stigma can be. And much of what we're going to think about with stigma is people whose lives are completely oppressed and marginalized because of a discrediting identity. And that's worthy of study. But I also like to look into this thing I call liminal stigma, which is like the lesser version of stigma that comes from knowing that some people really, really do think badly of you, but it's also not going to affect your life if you don't want it to, and that kind of a thing. So I want to dive into the variations of stigma that can exist.
[32:15]
Michael Johnston
Yeah, Liminality in my conceptualization of it is kind of like a blip in reality. Right. It's all of a sudden a very short period of time where you go out of your everyday experience, but eventually we reconverge back into reality. Right. And so while it may be a blip and have a short term impact on who we are, by and large, it's not going to. Excuse me, it may not have a much larger impact. Right.
[32:44]
Dr. Eric Oselva
And if you think about what happens with a lot of political controversies, you can think, okay, I take this position. Oh, wow. There's some people who are really upset with me for taking this position. And I guess my thoughts on liminal stigma is that it's not. Nothing like it is meaningful that to know that there's. To have concrete evidence of somewhere, somewhere, some, somebody somewhere saying some really negative things about you. And the conversation can get quite vilifying. So you'll see people who support the AR15 being referred to as amosexuals who are a cancer on society, who are endangering their children. So within a tight quotation, you can have somebody who favors access to AR15s being called having a sexual fetish for the gun, who is endangering, not Just society at large, but their own children. That's a tight set of negative ideas about a very real category of person. So if you're an AR15 enthusiast and you see that comment, you're going to say, okay, there are some people who really dislike me or dislike the idea. And so I think that's, that's not nothing. But at the same time, they're not actually engaging with this person. They can turn off the computer. You know, they're, it's, it's not necessarily going. They, they don't have to tell everybody that they encounter at work or wherever about what they think about AR15s. So it's, it's liminal in the sense that you can avoid it. You, it can be minimal, but it's also real. It's a thing that exists.
[34:19]
Michael Johnston
The ability that we have as agents in society to choose to engage or not engage in politics.
[34:25]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, absolutely. And then the other side of that, a big theme of that is that I think as we're discussing politics, there's really a question of, okay, do I want to stigmatize this person who disagrees with me or not? And again, there might be times where it makes sense to do so. There might be times where it makes strategic sense not to do so. That's for an individual in their own situation to decide. But I think as I just give a number of examples of more stigmatizing and less stigmatizing ways of discussing people, people can get a sense of their option for how they go about constructing reality and then maybe think through the consequences of what does it mean if I give this person an olive branch? Or what does it mean if I acknowledge some of the ideas that this person has? Or what does it mean if I describe them as somebody who deserves to be on the absolute margins of society?
[35:18]
Michael Johnston
And then the opposite or not the opposite, it's kind of the same side or maybe a different side of the same coin. I don't know how we want to phrase it, but then the process that a person takes to neutralize or destigmatize the elevated. The elevated identity known as a stigmatized person. Right. To become back neutral again and to find a medium between the two elevations.
[35:43]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yes, absolutely.
[35:46]
Michael Johnston
Excellent. Well, this has been great talking to you about this book. We've only really brushed the surface. I want the audience members to go out and read the book next instead of listening to another hour of our conversation. But it's really been great to talk about this book and get into one of the things that I said when I came to this, to this podcast is, you know, I can only read so much about a book on the back cover. I can only read so much about a book when I'm actually reading the pages. But to be able to actually talk to the author and have a conversation about what you were thinking as you wrote this book has really been a great privilege for me. And thank you for your time today, Eric.
[36:25]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Oh, absolutely. Thank you. And Michael, thank you for doing this because as somebody who listens to the podcast, I get the experience of getting a little bit into the background and the thinking behind books, and it's a tremendously useful service and tremendously valuable.
[36:40]
Michael Johnston
But we do have time for one more question because I'm sure that our audience members want to know, what are you up to now? What are you working on?
[36:48]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity. So I work incrementally. So with this book being out and there's a lag time between a book being completed and coming out, I've had the opportunity to take some new steps, but I like to make some small steps. So the next project is going to be pretty similar to this one, but with a couple of important changes which justify a new project. Instead of. In this book that I've. That we discussed today, I discussed cultural conflicts that are pretty easily recognizable as cultural conflicts where Republicans and Democrats have taken sides. These things go into party platforms. You can identify a liberal and conservative side to them, even if there's more complexity to it than that. But what I want to take up in my next project is looking at orthogonal cultural conflicts, conflicts that don't line up neatly with the left, right, divide. So the first case where I've made some headway and I've analyzed some data, collected data, analyzed data, presented it at a conference, is over the conflict or disagreement of people who bring dogs into public places, such as airplanes, restaurants, grocery stores. And look at some of the same ideas that I looked at in this book in terms of stigmatization, destigmatization, and how that happens when you don't have a political party or a social movement organized around advancing an agenda. And so that's part of it. So then dogs in public is the first case. But I also am struggling, or not struggling. I'm endeavoring to look for cases that, that don't have a left or right. And it's a little tricky because a lot of things that become a conflict become institutional. A political party will take it up. Right. But things like gambling tipping to some extent, I think housing development and things like AI and data centers don't necessarily sit on the left right divide. And if I can find that, they don't really sit on the left right divide. That's what I mean by struggling. Have to actually look and make sure that there isn't an identifiable left right position or it hasn't been incorporated into institutionalized politics. That I want to look at these cases, and I want to see if they're any different from the more politicized cases of cultural conflict.
[39:14]
Michael Johnston
So the kind of. The problems of polarization of politics, there's an inkling of that in there as well. And the problem of seeing politics as dichotomous rather than as a continuum.
[39:24]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Absolutely. And part of the reason why this project will be a bit of a struggle is that if a controversy exists for long enough, I think you will see people bring in other cultural conflicts into it. But at the same time, I will say with the dogs in public, people bringing dogs into public, there isn't a lot of discussion of Trump derangement syndrome or conservatives or maga. For the most part, the conversation can get pretty vilifying. People will say some pretty people will have very negative things to attribute to people who disagree with them on either side, but not a lot of recourse to the political divide, which I think might actually have some consequences for it. And then ultimately, what I want to do is I want to dig a little bit deeper into the cultural warrants that we use for justifying our position. So here I'm drawing on the great Joel Best's ideas about how we use warrants, or he draws on Tolman's ideas about how use warrants to justify our claims. I want to look a little bit more into the cultural details of. All right, the ideas we use or don't use or who uses what ideas. And I think in doing that, I also want to get a. Develop our conceptualization of cultural disagreement a little bit so that we can have a little bit more of an eye towards variation within factions and then also agreement between factions.
[40:52]
Michael Johnston
Yeah, the sum is greater than its parts. And even with an identity, Right. Like we. We are not just a race, we are not just a gender. We are not just sports fans. We have a variety of things that all come together in this very messy ball of cells that have created humans. Yes.
[41:10]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, absolutely. And I think part of the task, especially for us interactionists here, is to capture this messiness, but with a little bit of order. So you want to be able to deal with this, demonstrate this messiness, but at least give some order to the messiness, if that makes any sense.
[41:32]
Michael Johnston
It does. I look forward to this, and I'm sure it's going to be similar to this book, maybe starting out as articles and then turning into something much greater and much more with many more pages. So I look forward to reading that, and I hope our audience will also keep an eye out for that and hopefully we'll have a chance to get on the show again together and talk about this. That would be great, Michael. All right, thank you, Eric. And to my audience, this has been another episode of New Books Network. I look forward to talking with all of you again soon.
[42:04]
New Books Network Announcer
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Summary6 min read

Podcast Summary

New Books Network – August 2, 2026

Guest: Dr. Eric O Silva
Host: Michael Johnston
Book Discussed: Contested Realities and Identity Destigmatization: Identity Construction in the Culture Wars (De Gruyter, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this episode, Michael Johnston interviews Dr. Eric O Silva, professor of sociology at Georgia Southern University, about his new book, Contested Realities and Identity Destigmatization: Identity Construction in the Culture Wars. The conversation delves into the book’s theoretical framework for understanding how identities are constructed, stigmatized, elevated, and destigmatized within contentious online contexts—especially as played out in the so-called culture wars. Dr. O Silva also sheds light on his research methodology, the nuances of identity construction, and how his findings can inform more nuanced public discourse.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Motivation and Scope of the Book

Curiosity about Divergent Realities: Dr. O Silva’s work is driven by an interest in how people define the same empirical phenomena very differently, especially when cultural conflicts arise and “meaning is kind of taken for granted.” He uses online discourse as his primary source due to its richness and variation.
Beyond Stigmatization: While online discourse is often seen as toxic, Dr. O Silva also highlights more respectful, diplomatic forms of engagement.

“Online conversation is oftentimes publicly understood as being toxic and stigmatizing and vilifying and tribalistic. And it is. But there’s also this side... that is more respectful, more diplomatic that I wanted to call attention to.” (Dr. O Silva, 05:33)

2. Defining Identity in Context

Interactionist View: Identity here is not about deep, internal, psychological constructs, nor merely about individuality or authenticity. Instead, Dr. O Silva focuses on identity as a set of social categories, constructed through interaction and conversation, using the ideas of Susie Scott and David Maines.

“Identity here is ideas about types of people. ...We define identity as a process. It’s something that’s always in a state of emergence and it emerges through interaction and conversation.” (Dr. O Silva, 09:18)
Case Studies: Topics analyzed include immigration, vaccine use, electric vehicles, trans youth healthcare, campus protests related to Israel/Gaza, AR-15 debates, and racialized police violence.

3. The Three-Stage Analytical Framework

Stages: Stigma → Elevation → Destigmatization
Dr. O Silva identifies a recurring process in the identity work seen in online culture war debates:
- Stigmatization: Discrediting or vilifying those who hold certain positions.
- Elevation: Constructing a “pristine” and admirable form of identity—projecting one’s group as good.
- Destigmatization: Decontaminating or neutralizing stigma by repositioning identities as not as bad as initially portrayed.
  
  “Elevation is the act of saying a person identity category is good... Destigmatization...is cleaning up an identity. It’s saying it’s not that bad.” (Dr. O Silva, 14:24)
Kaleidoscopic Reflections: The result is a fractured, dynamic self-image in public discourse, echoing Cooley’s Looking Glass Self.

4. Mechanisms of Destigmatization

Dr. O Silva details how actors in online debates soften boundaries and reduce stigma:

Boundary Avoidance: Focusing on the topic (e.g., AR-15s) without ascribing identity-based attributes to supporters or detractors.

“Boundary avoidance is where you talk about a topic and you don’t talk about the identities involved.” (Dr. O Silva, 17:58)
Partial Validation: Acknowledging points of agreement even amid disagreement, thus affirming interlocutors as worthy of engagement.

“...when you acknowledge some sort of agreement with somebody who you’re disagreeing with, what you’re doing is that you’re saying that they’re a person that is worthy of speaking to...” (Dr. O Silva, 19:17)
Diplomatic Accounting: Providing “acceptable reasons” for others’ (perceived wrong) conclusions—offering context rather than condemnation.
Motive Proffering (Persuasion): Inviting others to reconsider a position, implying their worthiness of persuasion and capacity for change.

“...the act of trying to give somebody a reason to join you is destigmatizing. ...there’s something wrong with you now, but you’ve got the possibility to change.” (Dr. O Silva, 24:02)

5. The Nature and Definition of “Culture Wars”

Open-Ended Definition: Dr. O Silva conceptualizes culture wars as conflicts where there is genuine disagreement over the morality of collective or institutional practices, choosing not to narrowly define it to retain analytic openness.

“I think of culture wars as being situations that involve real disagreement about the morality of some collective or institutional practice.” (Dr. O Silva, 25:36)
Not Just Liberal vs. Conservative: Culture wars do not always align with partisan divides; the phenomenon is more complex, with ample heterodoxy in everyday life.

6. Variation in Online Discourse and the “Liminal Stigma” Concept

Variation Across Topics: Some issues (e.g., electric vehicles) are more politely discussed; others (e.g., race and police violence) are highly contentious.
Liminal Stigma: Addressing gradients of social discrediting—sometimes stigma is temporary or avoidable but still meaningful.

“I call it liminal stigma, which is like the lesser version of stigma that comes from knowing that some people really, really do think badly of you, but it’s also not going to affect your life if you don’t want it to.” (Dr. O Silva, 31:25)
Agentic Choice: Individuals can decide when to engage, disengage, stigmatize, or extend an olive branch.

7. Future Research Directions

Studying Non-Polarized Conflicts: O Silva is investigating disputes without clear left-right alignments, such as controversies over dogs in public places, tipping, AI, and housing.

“Instead of...cultural conflicts that are pretty easily recognizable as cultural conflicts...I want to take up in my next project...conflicts that don’t line up neatly with the left, right, divide.” (Dr. O Silva, 36:56)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Agency in Stigmatization:
“Stigmatization is absolutely a choice. ...We can see agency in creating this stigma by seeing all the times where people don’t create the stigma and don’t vilify the people that they’re dealing with.” (Dr. O Silva, 05:53)
On the Limits of Sociological Analysis:
“I’m not going to tell you what is right or wrong. I’m going to tell you what is. And that’s all I can do because that’s my discipline. Sociology isn’t a Magic 8 ball.” (Michael Johnston, 24:55)
On Liminal Stigma:
“It is meaningful...to know that there’s...somebody somewhere saying some really negative things about you...But at the same time, they’re not actually engaging with this person. They can turn off the computer...it can be minimal, but it’s also real.” (Dr. O Silva, 33:54)
On the Task of Sociological Analysis:
“Part of the task, especially for us interactionists here, is to capture this messiness, but with a little bit of order...demonstrate this messiness, but at least give some order to the messiness.” (Dr. O Silva, 41:10)

Timestamps for Key Segments

[01:55] Book’s inception and driving questions
[05:33] The dual nature of online discourse (stigmatizing vs. respectful)
[09:18] Defining identity as a social category and emergent process
[11:24] The 'me' side of the I-me dichotomy in identity work
[14:24] Explaining the three-stage framework: stigma, elevation, destigmatization
[17:58] Boundary avoidance as a destigmatizing practice
[19:17] Partial validation and boundary work
[24:02] Diplomatic accounting & motive proffering
[25:36] Open-ended definition of culture wars
[31:25] Introducing “liminal stigma”
[36:56] Next research project: conflicts beyond left-right polarization
[41:10] The challenge of ordering sociological “messiness”

Episode Takeaways

Culture war debates are prime sites for studying how people construct not just competing realities, but competing identities.
Stigmatization, elevation, and destigmatization operate simultaneously in public discourse, especially online.
Destigmatization involves nuanced rhetorical and conversational moves that can mitigate harsh boundaries.
The concept of liminal stigma captures the spectrum between total social ostracism and everyday, negotiable slights.
Public cultural conflicts—and their impact on identity—are not always about left vs. right; new research avenues explore issues without clear ideological camps.

Recommendation:
For anyone interested in understanding the mechanics of contemporary cultural disputes—and how our digital practices shape who we think we are—Dr. O Silva’s book and this episode provide essential insights and frameworks.

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Transcript70 lines

[00:00]
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[01:19]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Welcome to the
[01:24]
Michael Johnston
hello and welcome. My name is Michael Johnston and I am the host of New Books Network. Today I have Dr. Eric Oselva, professor of sociology at Georgia Southern University to talk about his brand new Fresh off the shelf, Fresh from the printers Contested Reality, Identity Identity Construction in the Culture wars by Degreter, Contemporary degrader and it's part of the contemporary Social sciences section. Welcome to the show, Eric.
[01:53]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Thanks. Thanks for having me, Michael.
[01:55]
Michael Johnston
Excellent. So to start off the conversation, this is a very deep theoretical book. And how did you come about writing about this idea of contested realities and then, well, furthermore, the destigmatization of identity once it's been established through these realities. Right, yeah.
[02:16]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Appreciate you saying that. And I guess I'll start. I mean, I'll start off not at the very, very beginning, but in general in my career I've been fascinated by how people can define the same thing in different ways. So a lot of this for me, and it's not only about me, but what personally drives me is wanting to satisfy a curiosity about all the ways that people can define reality in an experience world. So just maybe Basic humanism. Now, in pursuit of this kind of funneling down and moving along in order to look. The best place to look at where people are defining reality differently is when you have a cultural conflict. So a lot of times we just go about our day and meaning is kind of taken for granted. But it's those moments where we have disagreement over something that matters, where we can really look at the constructive process. So what I've done is I'll take something where people are in a disagreement. So one topic I've covered is immigration. Another is vaccine use. And the place I look for this construction is online discourse. What I like about online discourse is that it's a natural artifact of the thing I truly care about. It's people doing the work of thinking about what's going on and expressing, using ideas about how to define reality. And also, online discourse provides a great deal of variation. So I. What I like is that I can find as many, many different ways of describing the exact same empirical phenomena. So. So that's. That takes me to a career where I look at how people define reality on Reddit, on Facebook, and now. But what brings me specifically to this book is that over time, I saw that I became interested in the fact that people, when they're defining reality, when they're interpreting what's happening with immigration or vaccines or AR15s or whatever the case might be, is that they also are having a conversation about what it means to be a particular type of person. So an important part of this constructive process is constructing identities, constructing, defining, and evaluating the people involved in these controversies, and then also the people who have an opinion of these controversies. So what emerged from all the. From a number of journal articles that I produced over a couple decades, or almost a couple decades, is a general theoretical argument that I thought worked for a book. And that argument is that when people discuss controversial topics, they will inevitably make claims, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, about the type of people who are involved in that controversy. And then an important caveat, addition to that argument is that this will sometimes involve stigmatizing people, but not always. So online conversation is oftentimes publicly understood as being toxic and stigmatizing and vilifying and tribalistic. And it is.
[05:34]
Michael Johnston
But.
[05:34]
Dr. Eric Oselva
But there's also this side of it that is more respectful, more diplomatic that I wanted to call attention to.
[05:41]
Michael Johnston
So kind of a definition of situations like those that are defined as real are real in their consequences. And one of those consequences might be a stigmatization of the person who. Who made such a claim.
[05:53]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, like, probably one of the central points that I want to bring home is that this stigmatization is absolutely a choice. So when we see discourse being stigmatizing, we can see agency in creating this stigma by seeing all the times where people don't create the stigma and don't vilify the people that they're dealing with.
[06:14]
Michael Johnston
And then I see some of the backstage frontstage sort of here as well. And I see Marshall McLuhan. I ran into this quote one time. One thing that a fish most often doesn't observe is the water that they're swimming in. And Marshall McCloon. Yeah. So, like, the identities that these people have and the meanings that they create for themselves might be quite subtle. And they may not even recognize the type of people who they are. I often hear people say that I'm a good person, even if others might not think they are.
[06:41]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the. So in terms of, like, why write a book instead of a journal article? I kind of. I came to a point where I had some things that I thought were useful for a more general book reading audience versus the much more specialized journal reading audience is that instead of making a fairly minute theoretical advance, although I'd like to think I'm making some theoretical advance, I think a book like this helps us to see the water that we're swimming in. So as I go through a number of specific controversies and how people can define people in them, I think people might get a sense of the options that they actually have for how they discuss these things.
[07:22]
Michael Johnston
Yeah. And one of the things that I like most about books is it also gives you an opportunity to air things out and to get more in depth and to give you more room and space to write about it and to think with others, but think with your. With yourself as well, in your own mind as you write this material out. And I think you did a great job at that, and I enjoyed reading what you. What you had to say.
[07:40]
Dr. Eric Oselva
It's good of you say.
[07:42]
Michael Johnston
So one of the things that you mentioned, as we were just briefly talking, is identity and how it is central to your analysis of the meanings that are made and of the realities that are created. Do you see identity as being something primarily rooted in biology or psychology? Or how do you. How do you conceptualize identity? Is it fundamentally a product of socialization?
[08:05]
Dr. Eric Oselva
That's an important question. Identity is many different things, and it takes many different treatments. So if I'm going to say that I'm dealing with identity, I really have to Say what I am and what I'm not doing. So one way of thinking about identity, as you say, is as a psychological property or as a deeply internalized sense of who we are as a result of socialization. And that's not quite what I'm getting at here. And another way of thinking about identity is in terms of our search for authenticity or who we truly are, or relatedly, how we are, what our personal identity is, and that question of how we are different from everybody around us. And again, I'm not going with that either I'm going the version of identity I'm working with or the dimension of identity I'm working with are the source material for that socialization or the cultural ideas about what it means to be a particular type of person. So in this regard, I'm drawing on some particular symbolic interactionists. One in particular is the excellent Susie Scott in her book on identity, where she draws on the late great David Maines, who defines social identity as categories through which people may be located and given meaning. So identity here is ideas about types of people. And then now Susie Scott, where she comes back into it, drawing on that definition, she elaborates that the interactions of which I'm one, we define identity as a process. It's something that's always in a state of emergence, and it emerges through interaction and conversation. So where I come in in this study is that I look at those conversations where identity is being produced. So I find some specific cases. Vaccines, immigration, how people discuss electric electric vehicles, trans youth, care for trans, or health care for trans youth, campus protests in Israel, what to do with AR15s, and then also racialized police violence. And I look at these conversations and I look at the identities that emerge through these conversations or the categorization that emerges through these conversations.
[10:30]
Michael Johnston
So then I. My guess would be that you see identity as being something insitual rather than being a priori or something that existed prior to its performance in these online posts.
[10:45]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Absolutely. So part of the process of identity from, from the perspective I'm working from, is that I'm sure we have some, some essence and some personality and there's some, some, you know, inherent elements to who we are. And identity can be used to capture that. But what I'm thinking of is how we learn to be or how other people, how we learn about how other people think about us. So part of identity is the me or the self as social object that we see ourselves as and that we react to. So it's really in terms of the classic I me dichotomy it's the me side that I'm looking at here.
[11:24]
Michael Johnston
Yeah. So I mean, sophism is a median or Blue Marian approach, right? Yeah. Symbolic interactionism at its heart. Yes. So and then the other thing that really stood out here is the process that you created, a three stage process for each case, beginning with stigma, moving to elevation of that stigma, and then concluding with the stigmatization. And it provided a clear analytical framework that tied all these different chapters together. Because all of these topics, if you may, followed the same process. The content of each stage likely differed, but they followed that same process. Could you tell me more about each of these stages?
[12:07]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, absolutely. So what happens in this? So I mentioned that identities are constructed, but to kind of get into the how of identities are constructed. Now what we. Michelle Lamont and Arlie Hochschild, they've done some important work on how part of what fuels the animosity and the enmity of these, of certain cultural conflicts is the sense of being disrespected. So we can think of that in terms of stigma and stigmatization. That is, with stigma, following Goffman's version of it especially, stigma is an attribute that's discrediting something that basically contaminates one's sense of the purity of oneself. And what we know about the culture wars is that there's a lot of vilification, a lot of treating people as less than or being discredited.
[12:59]
Michael Johnston
Right.
[13:00]
Dr. Eric Oselva
So we've got. And I want to describe that process. So there's the stigmatization of identities in these controversies. So if you're supporting the campus protests of Israel's invasion of Gaza, you will have people saying very negative things about you. And that's the stigmatization part of the process. But where I want to get into, I think my contribution in adding on to this conversation about shame and pride and stigma and public controversies is that I want to detail two other things that happen in terms of building identities up. So Arlie Hochschild, Michel Lamont, they think of this in terms of recognition in respect to identities as a way. And I want to go into a bit more detail. And I say that this recognition process has two elements. So there's two ways of responding to the stigma. One way of responding to the stigma is through elevation. Elevation is the. It's the act of advancing an idea, an identity. It's basically, it's creating a boundary that projects a pristine version of the self. So it's a version of the self that's free of any contamination. Sometimes it's built by bringing other people down, but not always. So that's elevation. Destigmatization is. It's the act of decontaminating an identity. It's the removing of stigma. And really a good. A shorthand that I hope is good for thinking about this distinction I'm trying to make. It's the difference between saying somebody is good versus saying somebody is not bad. Elevation is the act of saying a person identity category is good. And generally, if we're saying somebody's good, we're talking about all the ways, all the values that they're aligned with, all the things that are admirable about them, all the ways of rising them up. If we're thinking about destigmatization is a little different. It's cleaning up an identity. It's saying it's not that bad. It's recognizing negative attributes in stigma, but minimizing them or describing them as something that can be changed or. And so forth. So it's sort of two different processes. So in terms of, like, what this all means for identity is. I think I can demonstrate. I think the book shows that when you look at online discussion of some controversial topic, you're going to see these three stages happening concurrently. You're going to get a. So whatever. Whatever position you take on electric vehicles, they should be subsidized or not. You're going to see some people who stigmatize you for that and say that you're bad at thinking or you have some other negative characteristics which disqualify you from being equal to everybody else. You're also going to see some people who validate your identity and elevate you and describe all the ways that you are correct for having this opinion and that you're a good person for having this opinion. And then there's this third thing that happens where you'll be described as not right, but not a monster either. And that's what I mean by destigmatization. So I think the result is we get this kaleidoscopic image of ourselves reflected back on it. So if we think of Cooley's Looking Glass self, what happens with public controversies is that we get these three versions of self that are rather fractured.
[16:38]
Michael Johnston
Yeah, that's interesting.
[16:39]
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[16:39]
Michael Johnston
Because I was a conflict manager. It's making me think about that. I was a conflict manager in elementary school. It was like fifth or sixth grade, and there were two versions. There was, you know, I was. I was standing in between as a liaison, and I was supposed to be the rational voice so being able to see the extremes or elevated versions on both sides, and then realizing also that there is a social structure that's in place, that's also temporal. And understanding how identity fits within the socially constructed reality that exists within the culture wars is a very complex. But I think that's exactly what you are butting heads with in this book. Yeah. So what distinguishes elevation from destigmatization? So my understanding of elevation is that if it's music or if it's a sound being measured, elevation is when it kind of the spikes. But destigmatization, how does that happen, how does that occur, and how does it contribute to the broader process of identity construction?
[17:50]
Dr. Eric Oselva
So in addition to identifying these categories, I want to show how they happen. And there are some specific ways that destigmatization is produced. One way of producing destigmatization is what I call boundary avoidance. Boundary avoidance is where you talk about a topic and you don't talk about the identities involved. So to back up, my basic argument is that as we discuss controversial topics, we end up making some statements about what it means to be a person who takes this position or that position. But it's not necess, you don't have to do that. Or it's possible to minimize this identity building process. So you can discuss the AR15 and then just discuss specifically how dangerous it is or is not, or how often it is or is not used in violence. And if you do that, you can focus on the object and you really can spend less effort and give less space to what it means to be a person who feels this way or that way. So boundary avoidance is you really just try and stick to the evidence and stick to what's happening now, not what it means to be a person who thinks this way or that way. So that's one way of doing destigmatization. Another way of doing distinguishation is through rearranging the vocabulary of motives or the motives that we attribute to people or the attributions that we make to people. So one way. So a subform here of destigmatization is what I'll call partial validation. This is where you're having a conversation with somebody and you say, okay, I actually agree with you on X, Y and Z, but I disagree with you on this other position. So that's a pretty common conversational element, bit of rhetoric there. But what I want to call attention to is that when you acknowledge some sort of agreement with somebody who you're disagreeing with, what you're doing is that you're saying that they're a person that is worthy of speaking to, worthy of communicating with somebody who's worthy of being persuaded. Is that making sense?
[20:11]
Michael Johnston
Makes a lot of sense. It's like boundary work that Lamont and others have talked about. It's also the emotional labor that Hochschild talked about in her writings. And it's this concept that I'm working with, the boundary perception. Right. So it's the actual inaction of the, of the perceptions that people have about themselves and their surroundings through the things that they, that they decide to engage with, through the dialogue that they carry out online or face to face. But you focus on the online, the online interaction that's taking, that's occurring. Yeah.
[20:51]
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[21:46]
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[21:52]
Dr. Eric Oselva
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[22:10]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Simplisafe Active Guard outdoor protection plan starting at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com licenses for alarm license information. Tennessee 2012 and if I may, there's some other elements of. I could get a little bit more into the details destigmatization. So another, another form is something I call diplomatic accounting. So within sociology, as some of our audience might be aware, some might not, there's a long history of looking at how people explain themselves and give accounts for why they've broken some norm or another, why they shoplifted or why they were late to class. And it's a long literature and there's been less thinking about how we account and give accounts for our adversaries. So one thing I try and show in the book is that there's this form of accounting I'll call diplomatic accounting, where we give acceptable reasons for being wrong or acceptable reasons for being on the other side of a boundary. So if we're talking about vaccines, we can say, okay, you're wrong to be in favor of vaccines, but I can see why you came to this wrong conclusion. Obviously it can go the other way as well. So with diplomatic accounting, you're coming up with acceptable reasons for why somebody would come to an inconclusion an incorrect according to you conclusion. Another element of destigmatization is something I'll call. I call it motive proffering, but it's really just persuasion. It's giving somebody a reason to come to your side, which in doing so, in saying, oh, you haven't thought about this, but if you thought about this, you'd be more in favor of immigration restriction or opening immigration up, either way, but if you thought about this consequence, you'd probably be on my side. So you're giving the act of trying to give somebody a reason to join you is, is destigmatizing. It's saying, all right, there's you're not right now, there's something wrong with you now, but you've got the possibility to change. And kind.
[24:07]
Michael Johnston
I'm laughing kind of because it makes me think of like, well, well, this is use of persuasion, trying to draw people to the other side. It may be still violating a logical fall. It may still be logic violating logical rules.
[24:21]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Absolutely. I'll take the opportunity to maybe say as I do this one inspiration I don't have in the book is to convince people of what they should think about policing or health care or whatever. My job is to show you what people are saying and what what people are saying says about how identities are being made. But I treat, I, I am, I make no comment about whether or not I think somebody is correct in their argument or incorrect in their argument.
[24:56]
Michael Johnston
Oh, I tell people that I'm not a fortune teller. I told my undergraduates An Introduction to Sociology. I'm not going to tell you what is right or wrong. I'm going to tell you what is. And that's all I Can do because that's my discipline. Sociology isn't. Isn't a Magic 8 ball.
[25:09]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm hoping readers are going to. And readers of course are capable of coming to this with their own ideas about what they think is right or wrong. My job is just to show you what happens to people's activities in public discourse.
[25:26]
Michael Johnston
So another question. You talk about this idea of culture wars. How do you define culture wars in the context of this book?
[25:34]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, that's a good question. Because it's something I don't think I. I don't explicitly define it in the book. I leave it open a little bit and I have some reasons for doing this. So in general, I think of culture wars as being situations that involve real disagreement about the morality of some collective or institutional practice. There are going to be situations where something is commonly done that some people find to be perfectly okay and some people will find to be abhorrent. But I don't want to define it more specifically than that for a couple of reasons. One is that I'm not sure that we actually have discrete lines between culture wars versus other types of disagreement. It's probably a continuum. So I treat it as more of you know it when you see it kind of a thing. And the other reason, and I don't want to necessarily try and narrow down those discrete distinctions just yet because I don't want to put the cart before the horse. I think if we define culture wars too specifically, we can. That will take us away from some relevant phenomena. So I want to leave it a little bit open ended. So for instance, what I mean by I don't want to over define it. A lot of times when we study culture wars or think about culture wars, we think of a clash of ideologies between conservatives and liberals, or progressives and people on the right or versus the left. And I think that's absolutely there. When we look at these topics, we can absolutely see people aligning with Democrats, people aligning with Republicans and so on. So that distinction works. But I don't think we want to have an over determined sense of the ideologies that are driving people. Because as everybody recognizes, there's not a lot of necessarily what Philip Converse calls ideological discipline amongst people in their actual everyday lives. There are people who are not perfectly aligned with either ideology or more ideologically heterodox. And if we focus too much on the liberal versus conservative end of it, I mean, there's a good reason for doing that, of course, but I want to be able to capture some of the things that don't work exactly with liberal or conservative or some of the diversity within the conservative side side or diversity within the. The liberal side of things.
[28:09]
Michael Johnston
So I'm thinking of, you know, war makes it sound more severe than cultural disagreements. And I think that there's important in using war rather than disagreement because it's. It's serious clash and people taking it seriously matters in this. In this case.
[28:23]
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[28:24]
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And that.
[28:24]
Michael Johnston
And that's.
[28:24]
Dr. Eric Oselva
That's part of where you get into. I guess some of the difficulty here is that there's a lot, probably a little bit of emotional. There's some variation in terms of people's emotions with regard to these things. So cultural wars can and have involved actual violence and violent outbursts and can also involve, you know, relationship dissolution and that type of a thing. But also it can be pretty low salience for people, too. So, yeah, disagreement is probably the phenomenon I'm interested in, but it can become. But the term culture war is used. So I also will use that to help locate myself within the universe of discourse on this topic. But, yeah, war is. It makes some sense, but it's also problematic as a descriptor.
[29:15]
Michael Johnston
Yeah. But I think it can get into it, and it's not liberal or conservative because it could be something as, I don't know. I say I'm not a huge. I'm a sports fan, but I'm not a fanatic. Which is weird to say that to begin with, because being a sports fan means that I'm a fanatic. Right. Anyway, you know, Cowboys or Eagles or something like coffee. Drinking it black or drinking. Oh, an Eagles fan. Oh, I'm a Cowboys fan. But we get a lot.
[29:44]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yearly. That's. What a nice coincidence.
[29:50]
Michael Johnston
Or a, you know, or drinking your coffee black or with cream. Right. I mean, these are debates that people get into and can become serious during certain times or certain seasons when people see and have these little squibbles about how it should be and ought to be and what those characteristics of people mean about them and who they are, particularly Eagles and Cowboys thing.
[30:17]
Dr. Eric Oselva
And to some extent, I don't want to. I want to be able to capture that sense of. Because not all of these controversies are equally warlike. So of the things that I covered, I would say that the electric vehicles one was the most polite. Now, there was certainly some stigmatization there, and I documented that. So if you like electric vehicles, if you dislike them, you will see reflected back to you validation and stigma and some destigmatization in between. But on the whole. The tenor of that conversation had less vilification and people were more willing to try and focus on how people might disagree with them. And also the. The humanity of how people. Of the people who disagree with them. And then also the empirics of the case. Some other cases were much more emotionally hot, such as the discussion of race and police violence, which.
[31:14]
Michael Johnston
Yeah, but it all matters, right? Yeah, it all matters because one of the things you think about, probably as you're writing this, is Goffman's categories of stigmatization and the ways in which people can fall from glory.
[31:26]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Absolutely. And so part of a goal of this type of work is besides the culture war, is to refine our vocabulary for stigma. Because on the one hand, stigma can be. And much of what we're going to think about with stigma is people whose lives are completely oppressed and marginalized because of a discrediting identity. And that's worthy of study. But I also like to look into this thing I call liminal stigma, which is like the lesser version of stigma that comes from knowing that some people really, really do think badly of you, but it's also not going to affect your life if you don't want it to, and that kind of a thing. So I want to dive into the variations of stigma that can exist.
[32:15]
Michael Johnston
Yeah, Liminality in my conceptualization of it is kind of like a blip in reality. Right. It's all of a sudden a very short period of time where you go out of your everyday experience, but eventually we reconverge back into reality. Right. And so while it may be a blip and have a short term impact on who we are, by and large, it's not going to. Excuse me, it may not have a much larger impact. Right.
[32:44]
Dr. Eric Oselva
And if you think about what happens with a lot of political controversies, you can think, okay, I take this position. Oh, wow. There's some people who are really upset with me for taking this position. And I guess my thoughts on liminal stigma is that it's not. Nothing like it is meaningful that to know that there's. To have concrete evidence of somewhere, somewhere, some, somebody somewhere saying some really negative things about you. And the conversation can get quite vilifying. So you'll see people who support the AR15 being referred to as amosexuals who are a cancer on society, who are endangering their children. So within a tight quotation, you can have somebody who favors access to AR15s being called having a sexual fetish for the gun, who is endangering, not Just society at large, but their own children. That's a tight set of negative ideas about a very real category of person. So if you're an AR15 enthusiast and you see that comment, you're going to say, okay, there are some people who really dislike me or dislike the idea. And so I think that's, that's not nothing. But at the same time, they're not actually engaging with this person. They can turn off the computer. You know, they're, it's, it's not necessarily going. They, they don't have to tell everybody that they encounter at work or wherever about what they think about AR15s. So it's, it's liminal in the sense that you can avoid it. You, it can be minimal, but it's also real. It's a thing that exists.
[34:19]
Michael Johnston
The ability that we have as agents in society to choose to engage or not engage in politics.
[34:25]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, absolutely. And then the other side of that, a big theme of that is that I think as we're discussing politics, there's really a question of, okay, do I want to stigmatize this person who disagrees with me or not? And again, there might be times where it makes sense to do so. There might be times where it makes strategic sense not to do so. That's for an individual in their own situation to decide. But I think as I just give a number of examples of more stigmatizing and less stigmatizing ways of discussing people, people can get a sense of their option for how they go about constructing reality and then maybe think through the consequences of what does it mean if I give this person an olive branch? Or what does it mean if I acknowledge some of the ideas that this person has? Or what does it mean if I describe them as somebody who deserves to be on the absolute margins of society?
[35:18]
Michael Johnston
And then the opposite or not the opposite, it's kind of the same side or maybe a different side of the same coin. I don't know how we want to phrase it, but then the process that a person takes to neutralize or destigmatize the elevated. The elevated identity known as a stigmatized person. Right. To become back neutral again and to find a medium between the two elevations.
[35:43]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yes, absolutely.
[35:46]
Michael Johnston
Excellent. Well, this has been great talking to you about this book. We've only really brushed the surface. I want the audience members to go out and read the book next instead of listening to another hour of our conversation. But it's really been great to talk about this book and get into one of the things that I said when I came to this, to this podcast is, you know, I can only read so much about a book on the back cover. I can only read so much about a book when I'm actually reading the pages. But to be able to actually talk to the author and have a conversation about what you were thinking as you wrote this book has really been a great privilege for me. And thank you for your time today, Eric.
[36:25]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Oh, absolutely. Thank you. And Michael, thank you for doing this because as somebody who listens to the podcast, I get the experience of getting a little bit into the background and the thinking behind books, and it's a tremendously useful service and tremendously valuable.
[36:40]
Michael Johnston
But we do have time for one more question because I'm sure that our audience members want to know, what are you up to now? What are you working on?
[36:48]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity. So I work incrementally. So with this book being out and there's a lag time between a book being completed and coming out, I've had the opportunity to take some new steps, but I like to make some small steps. So the next project is going to be pretty similar to this one, but with a couple of important changes which justify a new project. Instead of. In this book that I've. That we discussed today, I discussed cultural conflicts that are pretty easily recognizable as cultural conflicts where Republicans and Democrats have taken sides. These things go into party platforms. You can identify a liberal and conservative side to them, even if there's more complexity to it than that. But what I want to take up in my next project is looking at orthogonal cultural conflicts, conflicts that don't line up neatly with the left, right, divide. So the first case where I've made some headway and I've analyzed some data, collected data, analyzed data, presented it at a conference, is over the conflict or disagreement of people who bring dogs into public places, such as airplanes, restaurants, grocery stores. And look at some of the same ideas that I looked at in this book in terms of stigmatization, destigmatization, and how that happens when you don't have a political party or a social movement organized around advancing an agenda. And so that's part of it. So then dogs in public is the first case. But I also am struggling, or not struggling. I'm endeavoring to look for cases that, that don't have a left or right. And it's a little tricky because a lot of things that become a conflict become institutional. A political party will take it up. Right. But things like gambling tipping to some extent, I think housing development and things like AI and data centers don't necessarily sit on the left right divide. And if I can find that, they don't really sit on the left right divide. That's what I mean by struggling. Have to actually look and make sure that there isn't an identifiable left right position or it hasn't been incorporated into institutionalized politics. That I want to look at these cases, and I want to see if they're any different from the more politicized cases of cultural conflict.
[39:14]
Michael Johnston
So the kind of. The problems of polarization of politics, there's an inkling of that in there as well. And the problem of seeing politics as dichotomous rather than as a continuum.
[39:24]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Absolutely. And part of the reason why this project will be a bit of a struggle is that if a controversy exists for long enough, I think you will see people bring in other cultural conflicts into it. But at the same time, I will say with the dogs in public, people bringing dogs into public, there isn't a lot of discussion of Trump derangement syndrome or conservatives or maga. For the most part, the conversation can get pretty vilifying. People will say some pretty people will have very negative things to attribute to people who disagree with them on either side, but not a lot of recourse to the political divide, which I think might actually have some consequences for it. And then ultimately, what I want to do is I want to dig a little bit deeper into the cultural warrants that we use for justifying our position. So here I'm drawing on the great Joel Best's ideas about how we use warrants, or he draws on Tolman's ideas about how use warrants to justify our claims. I want to look a little bit more into the cultural details of. All right, the ideas we use or don't use or who uses what ideas. And I think in doing that, I also want to get a. Develop our conceptualization of cultural disagreement a little bit so that we can have a little bit more of an eye towards variation within factions and then also agreement between factions.
[40:52]
Michael Johnston
Yeah, the sum is greater than its parts. And even with an identity, Right. Like we. We are not just a race, we are not just a gender. We are not just sports fans. We have a variety of things that all come together in this very messy ball of cells that have created humans. Yes.
[41:10]
Dr. Eric Oselva
Yeah, absolutely. And I think part of the task, especially for us interactionists here, is to capture this messiness, but with a little bit of order. So you want to be able to deal with this, demonstrate this messiness, but at least give some order to the messiness, if that makes any sense.
[41:32]
Michael Johnston
It does. I look forward to this, and I'm sure it's going to be similar to this book, maybe starting out as articles and then turning into something much greater and much more with many more pages. So I look forward to reading that, and I hope our audience will also keep an eye out for that and hopefully we'll have a chance to get on the show again together and talk about this. That would be great, Michael. All right, thank you, Eric. And to my audience, this has been another episode of New Books Network. I look forward to talking with all of you again soon.
[42:04]
New Books Network Announcer
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Eric O Silva, "Contested Realities and Identity Destigmatization: Identity Construction in the Culture Wars" (De Gruyter, 2026)

Eric O Silva, "Contested Realities and Identity Destigmatization: Identity Construction in the Culture Wars" (De Gruyter, 2026)

Podcast Summary

New Books Network – August 2, 2026

Episode Overview

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Motivation and Scope of the Book

2. Defining Identity in Context

3. The Three-Stage Analytical Framework

4. Mechanisms of Destigmatization

5. The Nature and Definition of “Culture Wars”

6. Variation in Online Discourse and the “Liminal Stigma” Concept

7. Future Research Directions

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Timestamps for Key Segments

Episode Takeaways

Podcast Summary

New Books Network – August 2, 2026

Episode Overview

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Motivation and Scope of the Book

2. Defining Identity in Context

3. The Three-Stage Analytical Framework

4. Mechanisms of Destigmatization

5. The Nature and Definition of “Culture Wars”

6. Variation in Online Discourse and the “Liminal Stigma” Concept

7. Future Research Directions

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Timestamps for Key Segments

Episode Takeaways