Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

At an earlier Interdisciplinary social sciences conference in Grenada, I deconstructed the concept of political correctness and mapped out an explanation for its emergence and increasing use by the media as an interpretive framework. A decade later, populist politicians such as Trump in the US and Farage (a key advocate of Brexit) in the UK routinely draw upon a discourse featuring political correctness as a bete noire. I adopt a Foucauldian analysis to argue in this paper that such an anti-political correctness discourse has become hegemonic. This paper critically examines the arguments mounted by critics of political correctness and argues that they are not only flawed but that they constitute an ideology which delegitimises an agenda concerned to promote equality and diversity.