Mapping the Relationship between Public and Personal Culture: The Case of “Woke” in America

• In Event: Culture in/of Unsettled Times

Abstract

Cultural sociologists have increasingly accepted the distinction between “public culture,” namely culture “externalized in the form of public symbols, discourses, and institutions,” and “personal culture,” or the culture “made manifest at the level of the individual” (Lizardo 2017: 93). Few scholars, however, have empirically examined the degree to which these two types of culture overlap or misalign. This research seeks to contribute to the literature on public and personal culture by examining a widely debated cultural phenomenon: “woke.” As a term originating in social movements to signal an awareness of social injustice issues, it gradually became a negative signifier used to designate a perceived oversensitivity and extremism among progressives (Robinson 2022).
In this research, we combine the American Culture War Survey (Broćić and Karim 2026) with a computational analysis of three mainstream media outlets from 2015 to 2025 (The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal) and Twitter to examine: (1) the extent to which public narratives around “wokeness” are aligned or misaligned with personal understandings of it; (2) what factors explain this alignment or misalignment; and (3) how temporality influences the relationship between the two.

Authors

• Terrence Ting-Yen Chen, New York University

• Jintae Bae, New York University

• Sakeef M. Karim, Amherst College

• Milos Brocic, McGill University