17/08/2026
For several months, I’ve been reading and engaging in conversations around critical theory across a number of topics: psychology, science, politics, and economics, to name a few. Each has a long tradition of critical thought behind it, and they also intersect. None of these ideas are new; they rest on decades of rigorous work by thinkers around the world.
Here are just a few that interest me: Decontextualization - that is, removing or deemphasizing a person’s broader history and environment, especially the parts that are more difficult to quantify. Related to that is positivism - the tendency to privilege what can be quantified and measured over other forms of knowledge. There are also institutional and professional incentives that bias toward certain explanations over others. Also, I think sometimes even more interestingly, the way findings and interpretations are communicated can work in favor of some stakeholders over others. There is also techno-solutionism, along with the perennial questions of medicalization and the pressure to standardize complex experiences into categories, protocols, and treatments.
Inspired by the Palm Springs School for Social Research, and of course the Frankfurt School (the OG!), I’m instigating more conversation and reflection on how these ideas apply to the misophonia world today. It starts offline, off social media.
Later this year, you’ll start to hear special episodes on the podcast featuring experts who can shed more light on some of the topics above. Eventually, I plan to publish pieces that map all of this to misophonia.
If you’re interested in participating, please reach out. Especially if you can hang in person at SK Coffee in Saint Paul, MN, the unofficial HQ of this project.
Some of the thinkers we’re reading: Michel Foucault, Byung-Chul Han, Eva Illouz, Catherine Liu, Ivan Illich, heck even Slavoj Žižek and Mark Fisher. And Lacan, if I’m feeling brave.
—-
This post was originally published on the Substack:
https://misophonia.substack.com
