| In challenging particular ideologies and institutions, social movements offer more general examples of how people introduce and circulate new, often controversial meanings. The Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) Program at Binghamton University challenges the structure and epistemic grounds of higher education, arguing that evolutionary reasoning should become a foundational perspective for the study of human experience. Doing so, the Humanities and Social Sciences would be reoriented to seek the evolutionary origins and functions of (among other subjects) religion, government, law, art, and literature. Yet, this ambitious challenge must first and foremost be persuasively communicated to a variety of academic audiences, and some will find it objectionable. My research shows that the EvoS Program introduces and spreads its arguments by: reaffirming the movement's principles and goals as the 'messages' across increasingly novel (sometimes hostile) settings, establishing critical representations of critics, and socializing 'newcomers' to practice their own expressions of this message. The introduction and spread of new meanings can thus be seen as a sociolinguistic process involving contextualization across novel contexts, public confrontations between advocates and critics, and socialization of the newly persuaded into agents of the meaning's spread and endurance. |
