Spokes

Bret Alderman is a writer and life coach. His book Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language: A Jungian interpretation of the linguistic turn examines the linguistic turn of the twentieth century and goes into some detail on the works of postmodern thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida in a way that makes sometimes complex ideas approachable and understandable. He suggests that the linguistic turn has resulted in a neglect of consideration of the experiential, animate body and has resulted in a rift between language and materiality.More information on Bret can be found on his website aldermancoaching.com

Frankie Gaffney is a writer and linguist from Dublin City, Ireland. His debut novel, Dublin Seven, was published by Liberties Press in 2015. Articles by Frankie Gaffney published in the Dublin InquirerFrankie interviews author David Scott for the Irish Times

Alice Dreger is a writer, historian and academic from New York. She is probably best well known for her book Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and one Scholar’s Search for Justice which was a New York Times editor’s choice. Her other books include Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex and also One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her writing and research and was the inaugural recipient of the Courage Award from the Heterodox Academy. She has written articles for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Atlantic, WIRED, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other publications. When Bari Weiss wrote the article for the New York Times which popularised the term ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ back in 2018, Alice Dreger was to be one of the ‘renegade intellectuals’ originally set to be included in the piece but she herself asked to be left out of the piece. Her Ted Talk ‘Is Anatomy Destiny’ was presented at TEDxNorthwesternU in 2010 and has over a million views. Alice now lives in the city of East Lansing, Michigan, in the United States where she founded the local news organisation East Lansing Info (Eli).You can read more about Alice on her blog. If you are a student or a teacher in a college or university in the United States and interested in, or impacted by, restrictions on research, speech or writing you should check out the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

Janice Fiamengo taught English at the University of Ottawa where she was a Professor of English for sixteen years. She is the creator of the Fiamengo File, a series of videos about academic feminism, freedom of speech, and men’s issues. In 2018, she published Sons of Feminism: Men Have Their Say, a collection of personal essays by men about being male in a feminist culture. She can be found on Twitter @JaniceFiamengoThe Fiamengo File Season 1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHt1Hh27h4Bs3gYpWa5qAu_kOChBKDIawStudioBrule where all the Fiamengo Files can be found (in the Playlists section): https://www.youtube.com/user/StudioBrule/videosHer book Sons of Feminism: Men Have Their Say. Ottawa: Little Nightingale Press, 2018 can be bought via Amazon:https://www.amazon.ca/Sons-Feminism-Men-Have-Their/dp/1775081303https://www.amazon.com/Sons-Feminism-Men-Have-Their/dp/1775081303/

Helen Pluckrose is a writer and editor with a background in the Humanities. She is the editor of Areo magazine. Helen, along with James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, were the people behind the so called ‘Grievance Studies Project’ which exposed some of the problems in academia today. The three of them wrote a series of hoax academic papers which contained some fairly ludicrous ideas and then went on to get some of the papers published in academic journals.Since then, Helen has been working on the book Cynical Theories with James Lindsay. The book was published last month. It examines activist scholarship and the contemporary focus on race, gender, and identity, and the problems this causes both within academia and in the wider society.You can buy the book Cynical Theories here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everything-Identity/dp/1634312023This is a link to a documentary video by Mike Nayna about the Grievance Studies project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVk9a5Jcd1k&t=13sAreo Magazine is here: https://areomagazine.com/

Mark Roper was born in Derbyshire, England, in 1951. He moved to Ireland with his partner Jane in 1980 and has lived in Ireland ever since. He has seven collections of poetry published including his latest book ‘Bindweed’ which was published by Dedalus in 2017. ‘Bindweed’ was shortlisted for The Irish Times Poetry Now Award, as was Mark’s previous book ‘A Gather of Shadow’ which won the Michael Hartnett Award in 2014. He has worked on many collaborative projects down through the years including three books with the photographer Paddy Dwan: ‘The River Book: A Celebration of the Suir’, ‘The Backstrand: Tramore’s Open Secret’, and ‘Comeragh: Mountain, Coum, River, Rumour’. They are currently working on a book about the County Waterford coastline. He has written two librettos for operas composed by Eric Sweeney. Mark was editor of ‘Poetry Ireland’ for 1999. He has taught creative writing and literature classes for over twenty-five years. He was writer-in-residence at Waterford Regional Hospital from September 2002 to May 2003.Mark’s website: http://www.mark-roper.com/index.phpLink to buy his latest collection ‘Bindweed’, published by Dedalus in 2017: http://dedaluspress.com/product/bindweed/