George Lakoff, Co-founder/Sr. Fellow, Rockridge Institute; Author, The Political Mind

George Lakoff, Co-founder/Sr. Fellow, Rockridge Institute; Author, The Political Mind

Leading linguistic and political analyst, George Lakoff, will explain how language can be used as a critical tool in progressive politics, describing how our brains work in relation to society, why language is so important, and how Democrats can use this knowledge to their advantage to win the November elections. Lakoff believes that progressives have been fighting a losing battle in America for the last 30 years because, he says, the majority of citizens vote against their own self interests.

Lakoff is a professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. He has published many scholarly articles and books including The Political Mind (2008) as well as the influential book, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (2002). Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, he is best known for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society. He is particularly famous for his concept of the "embodied mind," which he has written about in relation to mathematics. In recent years he has applied his work to the realm of politics, exploring this in his books. He is the co-founder and senior fellow of the progressive think tank, the Rockridge Institute. He previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1995) and the Linguistics Society of America Summer Institute at the University of New Mexico (Summer, 1995).