(2023). "History Teaching, National Myths, and Civil Society". Hungarian Educational Research Journal, v13 n4 p502-514. One of the critical issues facing Historians today has been the emergence of Strong State regimes and the politicized pseudo history they produce in countries claiming to adhere to democratic norms. The attack on the Capital of the United States was based on a series of lies about voter fraud supported by President Donald Trump and members of Congress. Countering ideology based on a complete disregard for truth is now of paramount importance in the United States. This paper studies Trump's promise to Make America Great Again (MAGA) as a further evolution of Lost Cause mythos that began after the Civil War. The original story casts the enfranchisement of African Americans as a failure touting white supremacy and the righteousness of Jim Crow laws. How can History teachers counter these highly politicized myths? I suggest that the methodology of our profession may provide us with some important tools. John Dewey underscored the importance of critical inquiry to the preservation and… [PDF]
(2017). Trumpal Fears, Anthropological Possibilities, and Muslim Futures. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, v48 n4 p386-392 Dec. Reflecting upon a decade of research with Muslim youth across the United States, this article highlights the fears and concerns Muslim communities have expressed in the wake of Donald Trump's 2016 U.S. presidential victory. In explicating the concerns expressed by these youth, the author examines the context of Trump's rise and its relationship to American political culture and economy. The article discusses some possibilities and challenges for educational anthropologists to respond to the contemporary political moment…. [Direct]
(2017). High-Five Fridays: (Mis)Trust-Building in One White Liberal Community. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, v48 n4 p403-410 Dec. The shocking election of President Donald Trump following a campaign characterized by hateful and divisive rhetoric has left many people fearful. In this essay the authors recount their story about the difficulties they encountered trying to disrupt the normalization of white experience through a local community policing initiative in their liberal Northeastern community. They describe how discourses shaped and controlled conversations about race privileging the police over the policed and white over the other…. [Direct]
(2021). Ever-Present "Illegality:" How Political Climate Impacts Undocumented Latinx Parents' Engagement in Students' Postsecondary Access and Success. Journal of College Access, v6 n2 Article 5 p44-64 Sep. Using the ecological systems theory, this study highlights the significant impact the political climate in the United States (i.e., anti-immigrant sentiments and violence) has on undocumented Latinx parents' engagement in their children's education. Drawing from a larger qualitative, interview-based study that explored how undocumented Latinx parents were involved and engaged in their children's postsecondary access and success (Cuevas, 2019; 2020), this study focuses on undocumented parents' experiences and processing of the 2016 Presidential Election. Findings illustrate how the explicit racist, anti-immigrant, and nativist narratives then-Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump campaigned under and won forced undocumented Latinx parents to (re)evaluate how their undocumented immigration status impacted their parenting behaviors. Specifically, the election results caused parents to (1) increase their hyperawareness of the repercussions of their immigration status; (2)… [PDF]
(2021). Education Populism? A Corpus-Driven Analysis of Betsy Devos's Education Policy Discourse. Education Policy Analysis Archives, v29 n16 Feb. Scholars of political economy have raised the question of whether recent populist movements around the world signal the decline of neoliberal hegemony. What would such a decline mean for education policy, an arena that has been dominated by a neoliberal common sense for several decades? This study investigates the policy discourse of former U.S. President Donald Trump's Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, in order to assess the extent to which it aligns with the neoliberal common sense or draws upon discourses of populism that have been gaining traction in the last few years. Using methods of corpus linguistics, I engage in a critical discourse analysis of 59 of DeVos's public speeches delivered between 2017 and 2019 in comparison with a reference corpus of speeches delivered by DeVos's predecessors in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. The findings, informed by Ernesto Laclau's theory of populism as political logic and discourse, suggest that DeVos deploys several… [PDF]
(2023). Navigating White Waters: Generation Z Untraditional College Transition Amid Unprecedented Social, Health, and Academic Crisis. Higher Education Studies, v13 n2 p87-105. Over the last three years, crises of a historical magnitude have had a profound impact on the higher education system in the U.S. During the spring of March 2020, COVID-19, referred to as the coronavirus, caused a significant health crisis, killing hundreds of thousands of people, while disrupting the educational, economic, and health system (Gupta, 2021). The following year, a 46-year-old black man, George Floyd, was brutally murdered by a white police officer, sparking violent protests and debate around racial equity, policing, and justice. A toxic and polarizing political environment further complicated issues under the controversial leadership of President Donald Trump. Colleges and universities had to quickly pivot to remote instruction, enforce mask mandates, and carefully navigate discourse to minimize disruption to the education of students. The adjustment was challenging for most institutions, particularly those classified as Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) or Minority… [PDF]
(2019). The Philosophy of Conversation: We Owe It to Our Students to Teach Them How to Disagree. Liberal Education, v105 n1 Win. The authors, Bertha Alvarez Manninen, a pro-choice associate professor of philosophy at Arizona State University, and Jack Mulder Jr., a pro-life professor of philosophy at Hope College in Michigan have argued with each other since graduate school about abortion and other issues, while respecting each other's stances and friendship. In the current political climate, however, they have become exhausted with the increasing polarization as divisions on political values that reached record levels during Barack Obama's presidency have only continued to grow since Donald Trump took office. In this article, they present the importance of teaching students how to disagree. A conversation between the two is presented about not just agreeing to disagree but allowing each other to see an argument from another person's point of view…. [Direct]
(2020). Reporting Quotable yet Untranslatable Speech: Observations of Shifting Practices by Japanese Newspapers from Obama to Trump. AILA Review, v33 n1 p157-175 Oct. When a newsmaker (i.e., a newsworthy subject) is speaking or being spoken about in a foreign language, quoting requires translation. In such "translingual quoting" (Haapanen, 2017), it is not only the content of the speech but also its translatability that determines newsworthiness. While news media in some countries prefer indirect quotation, Japanese media favor direct quotes (Matsushita, 2019). This practice yields relatively clear source text (ST)-target text (TT) relationships in translingual quoting, especially when a political speech is directly quoted by newspapers, offering abundant data for news translation research (Matsushita, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2019). However, this research approach has been challenged by the rise of a public figure known for making headlines with his extemporaneous remarks: US President Donald J. Trump. Translingual quoting of Trump in the non-English media has proven at times a "nearly impossible quest" (Lichfield, 2016) because of… [Direct]
(2018). The Study on the Interpersonal Meanings of Modality in Micro-Blogging English News Discourse by the Case of "Donald Trump's Muslim Entry Ban". Advances in Language and Literary Studies, v9 n2 p110-118 Apr. News is a kind of writing style, which is so valuable that many linguists choose it to study. This thesis aims to conduct a systemic analysis of modality type, value and orientation under the framework of Halliday's Systemic-functional Grammar in order to explore the interpersonal meanings of modality in English news discourse. The research data is drawn from microblogging official platforms, among which 20 pieces of news discourse in all are selected to establish a small type of corpus. All the 20 pieces of news discourse are taken from the microblogging in 1.20 to 2.20 of 2017. All the news is about "Donald Trump's Muslim Entry Ban" (A ban made by Donald Trump, which claimed that Muslim can't enter America). Meanwhile, both qualitative and quantitative research methods are adopted to discover the distribution of modality in micro-blogging news discourse and its interpersonal meanings, and hence to deepen people's cognition and understanding on micro-blogging news… [PDF]
(2018). Contentious Dialogue: University Presidential Response and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, v40 n6 p533-549. In recent years, technology has made it possible, and at times critical, for college and university presidents to increase their campus-wide public communication. However, there is little research that analyses these frequent and timely presidential communications. Using grounded theory, this study took steps to fill this gap by analysing the unprecedented response campuses had to the 2016 United States presidential election of Donald Trump. The analysis focused on the responses of presidents from the fifty state flagship universities and found emergent themes of unity, contentious election, negative event, university values, civil dialogue, services offered, and emotional rhetoric, while also finding significance in whether the letters were sent proactively or reactively…. [Direct]
(2018). "Julius Caesar" and the 2016 Presidential Election. English Journal, v107 n4 p64-66. One of the first plays that the author assigned in his Spring 2017 Shakespeare for the 21st Century class was "Julius Caesar." In conjunction with the play, he handed out an article written by political commentator Andrew McGill that explained the decision by West Virginian coal miners, a demographic that had historically voted blue in presidential elections, to cast their ballots for Donald Trump. Adding in the recent philosophical work "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work" by Matthew Crawford, the author suggests how creative pedagogy can help students better understand changing voting habits during the 2016 presidential election…. [Direct]
(2017). How Much of This Is New? Thoughts on How We Got Here, Solidarity, and Research in the Current Moment. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, v48 n4 p354-361 Dec. This article offers three meditations on the 2016 election of Donald Trump for consideration by the readers of "Anthropology & Education Quarterly": first, to query what is "new" about this political era; second, to draw attention to the performance of political opposition and violences of solidarity; third, to document my own navigations of the political present as a researcher and educator with thoughts for others who work with or are marked as "targeted populations."… [Direct]
(2020). Countering COVID-19-Related Anti-Chinese Racism with Translanguaged Swearing on Social Media. Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, v39 n5 p607-616 Sep. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a spectacular rise in social media communication and an unprecedented avalanche of global conversation. This paper traces the emergence of the racist term "Chinese virus" used by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, on the Western social media platform Twitter and its reception and recontextualization on Chinese social media. Creative bilingual responses fusing English and Chinese resulted in a popular searchable meme "#[foreign characters omitted]#" ("#Chinglish used for cross-cultural communication#"), on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. Such linguistic creativity involves a variation of swears to mock and condemn the racist phrase. Formally, linguistic practices such as self-coinage, transliteration, verbal repetition, and acronyms can be observed. Functionally, the recontexualizations evidence a defensive ideology linked to nationalism and modernism. Ultimately, combatting the… [Direct]
(2018). Critical Race Parenting in the Trump Era: A Sisyphean Endeavor? A Parable. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE), v31 n1 p70-81. This article examines the complicated decisions parents make when they decide to raise critically conscious children. The article argues that critical parenting in US society is often analogous to the Greek myth of Sisyphus. Using Critical Race Parenting, Critical Race Theory, and Critical Whiteness Studies, this critically interpretive parable looks to the election of Donald Trump as US President and the ways whiteness, patriarchy, sexism, xenophobia, ableism, and racism function in social, cultural, economic, and educational spheres. This parable tells the story of Sue Libertad and analyzes how parenting in the era of Trump is Sisyphean. This concludes with a discussion of the importance of talking about race, racism, and heterosexism with our children, which disrupts whiteness, sexism, and patriarchy, and ultimately Trump and his administration…. [Direct]
(2016). Teaching in the Time of Trump. Social Education, v80 n1 p36-41 Jan-Feb. This article discusses how the divisive rhetoric of presidential candidate Donald Trump presents a challenge for teachers covering the presidential primaries in their classrooms. This article discusses democracy and the challenge of demagoguery, as well as pedagogical issues that teachers face while teaching in the time of Trump. The article shares approaches that can be taken with students regarding the topic of causal origins of Trump's rhetoric…. [Direct]