Project Luminas. What and Why?

To illuminate ideological patterns via examining the origins and effects of the strange confluence of U.S. academic ideology with media.

Aug 01, 2023

When have you asked, really asked, yourself:

How do I personally know what I know about myself and the world?
By what means do I come to know anything beyond my daily interactions? beyond my campus or city or country?

My answer is quite simple: language.

It is the semiotic sea in which we humans swim whether in-person or on our phones. We take its structure for granted yet ignore how it conceals reality as much as it reveals it to us. Language is, ironically, a root cause of misunderstanding as are our assumptions that every word has a single essential definition when it is my lived contexts and backgrounds (associations) with each word that define each word differently from yours (ie. as when spouses, family, and friends disagree on a newborn’s name - everyone expresses disgust or alarm over certain names based on someone they knew with that name).

Then, Major League Media, social and corporate, compete viciously toward their bottom lines, producing their proprietary knowledge for us to consume and think is our own: ideological inception that distorts world events into clarity. MLM construct our knowledge by generating consumable clickbait via the rumor incentive of ‘breaking news’ iterations of incomplete information (what I call the fog of news).

Project Luminas - Digigoguery and Associationary - are my response to checking the ideological framing of their epistemic production and their use of language.

DEI. CRT. ESG. You’ve heard of one of these I’m sure.

Right now, universities, public schools, and companies create offices to implement the first. Universities teach the second while many U.S. K-12 schools teach the second via antiracist books and resources. Blackrock and Vanguard investment firms demand the latter. Media parrot and promote these ideas ad nauseam (until the Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light stock blow-up and boycott gave them momentary pause).

Each of these entities wields incredible power over us, and they demand that I conform to their vision of who they think I am. Often via guilt and shame per my higher education experiences which consist more of coercion and shame rather than research results free from ideological conformity.

So, the problem is: the Media and academia form ideological silos that need breaking.

Project Luminas - Intelleftuals - is my counterstory answer to this problem.

Some Useful Context

I conceived this project in 2019 at 33yrs old during my second MA in English Composition (at CSUSB) after observing and suffering under students’ zealous and evangelistic fervor for academic theories like intersectionality, critical race theory, queer theory, and social justice. They (students/professors via theories) interpreted and valued me according to my skin color and the past. Project Luminas is to be my counterstory (to use a research method from my discipline) set against the dominant stigmatized minoritarian valuation of my skin and place in society.

The project’s first iteration began as a blog called The Sky King Show: Hacking the Academy that infrequently documented some of my experiences being racially and gender scapegoated, shamed, and guilted (I’m white and male) in grad school and at Chaffey College where I directed a language learning center full-time. It was my inconsistent workaround to the unfamiliar linguistic terms and needless moral judgments I’d experienced. Inconsistent in part because due to the very real effect of orthodox conformity and cancel culture in academia, so several posts remain in draft format. It’s a justifiable concern that viewpoint diversity can sink my academic job prospects and the completion of my current dissertation (not to mention interrupt my ability to provide for our 4 girls who are 5-12yrs old).

Why risk those possibilities and achievements now?

Remaining silent in isolation is mentally more costly to me than speaking up. While I am by no means the first to discuss the prevailing ideology afoot in campuses, culture, corporations, Congress, and media, I do offer a unique, if limited, understanding of it that I hope will further complete the picture of its academic origins: since 2012, I have worked within and studied this broad ideology in over 30 graduate courses across 3 related disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Composition Studies, Rhetoric and Writing Studies). And, I risk speaking up for 4 reasons:

One is professional: academics are changing culture, intentionally so, and often obviate responsibility for the negative consequences of their efforts. I wish to share how I’ve navigated (failed and succeeded) this change in classrooms and assignments so I might live my own culture, viewpoint diversity, and speak in its defense free from unnecessary guilt and shame. Just maybe universities that value viewpoint diversity will notice I value the same heterodoxy. A second is personal: it is not enough for me to remain silent while our 4 girls, and millions more, are exposed to reductively racial and gendered aspects of this Intelleftualism at their K-12 schools. Many of these disempowering ‘critical’ theories remain untested to dangerous effects yet are advocated for and now manifest as curricular, social media, and peer trends. I want to hold my disciplines to account for their theories’ impacts on students and society. And third: encouraging this awareness in ~160 of my writing students a year is good, yet also reaching thousands more via Project Luminas is even better, better than an obscure academic journal. A fourth: collaborating is best. I aim to partner with individuals in ideologically dominated disciplines (communications, religion, sociology, history, etc.) to trace and cite where and when these ideas entered their respective discipline’s scholarship.

If you know interested individuals, will you please forward this to them?

Share Project Luminas

Tracing the ideology via texts is critical because RCWS practices citation justice wherein publications written by any muliply oppressing and omniphobic identity (explicitly white males) must not be cited in articles or presentations (subtractive identity) so that identities deemed marginalized are cited and thus empowered.

Because of what I’ve read and studied for the last decade, I can’t be gaslighted when ‘experts’ or politicians argue we don’t see evidence of anyone fundamentally changing cultural norms in our communities or kids’ schools. Sometimes I feel to call this substack ‘I survived academia’, yet I want to create my space within it and become collaboratively constructive, not vindictive. You might detect bitterness at my discipline’s severe flaws and hypocrisy, dogmatism and orthodoxy, and conformism and uniformity while preaching diversity and subversion. I want this project to provide solutions in addition to naming problems, to contribute constructively to the American society in which I live.

To that productive end, in a trilogy of PL subprojects, I can articulate in great detail why the Media and my disciplines fail to assess the effects and impacts of their theories - in my project of creating a modern rhetorical ethic of Epistemic Emissions. Via text-mining, rhetoric, discourse, and content analyses, I can identify the roles my disciplines have specifically played in propagating what is commonly referred to as the ‘woke’ worldview or discourse (Intelleftualism). In addition, I can also point to where some of my disciplines’ theories do succeed and where aspects of underutilized theories are misapplied to leftist partisan ends that yet could be applied to centrist or conservative ends (such as counterstory methodology).

These three subprojects and portmanteaus are:

Digigoguery (Digital + Demagoguery)
Intelleftuals (Left + Intellectuals)
Associationary (Association + Dictionary)

An upcoming post for each will describe each subproject’s objects of study, goals, and publication schedule in more detail. I have given myself a year from today to demonstrate this project’s viability which depends on subscribers (paid and unpaid).

So, if you, like me, use language ;) and social media, and have been exasperated at how academia and media coverage influenced your knowledge of the world, then feel free to share and subscribe to Project Luminas.

-Sky King