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Barack Obama condemned it. Black American activists championed it. Meghan Markle brought it to the Royal Family. \u201cWokeness\u201d has become a shorthand for one side of the culture wars, popularising concepts like \u201cwhite privilege\u201d and \u201ctrigger warnings\u201d - and the idea that \u201clanguage is violence\u201d.

Journalist Helen Lewis is on a mission to uncover the roots of this social phenomenon. On her way she meets three authors who in 2017 hoaxed a series of academic journals with fake papers on dog rape, fat bodybuilding and feminist astrology. They claimed to have exposed the jargon-loving, post-modern absurdity of politically correct university departments - whose theories drive \u201cwoke\u201d online political movements.

But is there really a link between the contemporary language of social justice warriors and the continental philosophy of the 1960s and 70s? And are critics of wokeness just reactionaries, left uneasy by a changing world?

Producer Craig Templeton Smith\nEditor Jasper Corbett