From Cancel Culture to Incarceration Culture

For more than a decade, cancel culture has contributed to the stifling of public debate and the ruin of private lives. Academics, artists, and professionals have found themselves deplatformed, disinvited, and unemployed for little more than expressing an opinion or publishing research that departs from current dogma. In From Cancel Culture to Incarceration Culture, his first book, Canadian lawyer and writer Collin May brings together a collection of essays on the cancel culture phenomenon. Drawing on his own experience as the target of a recent cancellation attack, May dissects the psychology, class motivations, and contemporary ideologies fueling cancel culture. As for its future prospects, May argues that cancel culture is undergoing a transformation from a socially driven occurrence to an institutional prosecutorial strategy deployed by the state to manage dissenting opinions outside the elite class. In response to this new “incarceration culture,” the author outlines proposals to combat this latest phase of cancellation.

Collin May is a Canadian lawyer and Adjunct Lecturer in Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine. He has published several articles and reviews on topics in political philosophy, cancel culture, professional regulation, and countering antisemitism. His writing has appeared in the National Post, Jerusalem Post, Law and Liberty, The Hub, C2C Journal, and such academic publications as Academic Questions and Society Journal. Educated at Harvard University, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and Dalhousie Law School, May worked with the United Nations International Telecommunication Union and the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland, before returning to Canada to study law. In 2022, following his appointment as Chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission, May became the target of a cancel culture campaign that cost him his job and severely damaged his career. Since that time, May has worked to combat cancellations through his writing and public advocacy.