I went to the Heterodox Social Science Conference 2026

I hate conferences: they bring out the worst in me. I become a fawning, politicking creep, continually eyeing the room for someone important to talk to. Hmm, let’s try him, he looks tall and distinguished. Oh no, he’s a retired lawyer who lives locally and “just turned up to hear what you had to say”! Quick, escape and find a bigshot, you quintessence of dung! I can’t do this well because I disgust myself too much.Heterodox Social Science is basically a political movement trying to fit into an academic box. The academic thrust, as put by its organizer Eric Kaufmann, is two-pronged: woke studies, i.e. explaining why academia is full of leftists, and heterodox social science, which is a grab bag of potential heresies. The first is a subfield of the study of ideology and is perfectly respectable but quite narrow. The second is broad, perhaps too broad. So the talks were diverse in both topic and quality. There were lots of legitimate scandals, like the Kamloops burials in Canada (which…