So popularity is a way to gauge accurate views and opinions? Wow Kim Kardashian and Miley Cyrus, who are much more well known that anyone you listed, must be the most correct people on earth.
Social sciences come from a very different way of studying and doing things than the hard sciences. They focus on social issues which are harder to study and gather data on. Social science results and methodologies are very different from hard sciences and I think should be treated different, but at the same time I would say are very useful when making policy decisions. Look at fields like history and political science, which do very useful research but have few lay people who know about any of the things going on in those fields let alone the latest and most cutting edge research. Are those fields suddenly invalid just because they aren't well known?
In her book Ruth Gilmore does not compare US prisons to gulags in an extreme polemical way, but instead states the similarities between the USSR and the state of California who both used prisons to address political and economic problems (like unemployment and drug trafficking). You say who would take her seriously, but very many people do who actually READ her book instead of making judgements based off something like a title or cover. Doesn't Richard Dawkins have a book called the Selfish Gene? Why would I read a book or trust a scientist who has a book saying genes are like people with our selfish disposition? No! He uses it as a metaphor to describe a complex argument about the nature of evolution and to make an argument about common ideas of altruism.
Actually my research isn't on either of those issues, but Gilmore talks a bit about the disproportionate rate black men are arrested. Many of my colleagues don't blame "whitey" and the ones who do don't get very far in the field. People in my field who do focus on that do look at past policies that seem to target poor people more than rich people (like crack carrying a higher prison sentence term than coke). Sometimes they will look at policies that only seem to affect certain racial or ethnic groups, yeah, but many people not just SJW's do the same.
I don't blame anything on Euro-centrism or rely on buzzwords, and actually many people in my field wouldn't get hired if there work was so simplistic to completely eschew the complexity that comes with many of the phenomenon that SJW's dismiss onto buzzwords.
My research project seeks to understand class and generational dynamics between different groups of Mexicans (and Mexican-Americans) who lived pre/post California became part of the United States.
If anything I'm denting the SJW talk of whites always being the source of everything bad by talking about past and present exploitation different Mexicans/Mexican Americans have put on one another to make money that involved unfair labor practices. To me this conversation is important for the Mexican community, because many of those generational conflicts with Mexican Americans who have been in the state longer and are richer using their familiarity with Spanish and Mexican culture to exploit unfairly recently immigrated people (and yes many of the people who I've talked to for my research came here documented) needs to be discussed more. Jody Agius Vallejo's, who is a professor at USC, research touches on this but in more of an economic way than my more geographic and historical study. None of her research, which is read widely in many Ethnic Studies program, blames "whitey" as you would put it. You might want to check out her book, which is called Barrios to Burbs: The Making of the Mexican-American Middle Class.
But why should I even suggest you reading a book? It seems like you are pretty committed to dodging many of my questions (like, what criteria do you use to judge an academic field's value?) and instead keep insisting that I think in a way that I absolutely do not think in.
You can say I belong to a cult, but I haven't made any groundless assumptions about you in any way. Yes I have made informed inferences based off things you said, but no groundless assumptions like you just did. Like I said before, it seems from everything that you have written that you embody all the things you put SJW's down for. To some people, that might just make you a hypocrite. I'll take an educated guess and just assume that you are brain washed and don't really known how to think critically for yourself, because you are in fact just as culty as the people you accuse of being culty.