Stop Blaming Foucault

My doctoral adviser was a brilliant and intimidating scholar. Stern but often playful and mischievous, he emphasized an open-ended curiosity about the strangeness of our world. He was also a radical social constructivist who believed our academic mission was to interrogate our own taken-for-granted truths about the world and to show how our knowledge was a product of cultural and historical understandings. His magnum opus was a deconstruction of post-traumatic stress disorder that showed the diagnosis was neither timeless nor universal but had emerged out of specific developments.