Social Text

Social Text is a postmodernist cultural studies journal published by Duke University Press.

The journal gained notoriety in 1996 for the so-called Sokal Affair when it published an article by the physicist Alan Sokal entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". Sokal had written the article as a deliberate hoax consisting of (to quote Sokal himself) "the silliest quotations I could find ... from some of the most prominent French and American intellectuals" along with "a nonsensical argument linking these quotations together" in which he argued that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. This set off a debate about academic ethics and the quality of research being published in the humanities. The Sokal Affair resulted in Social Text's' editors being awarded with the 1996 Ig Nobel prize for Literature.