(2021). Resistance, Solidarity, and Sisterhood in the Age of Trump: Images from the Women's March in Washington, D.C. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, v18 n1 p85-103. On Saturday, January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, there was an impressive Women's March in Washington, D.C., the nation's capital. The guiding vision and definition of principles of the Women's March equated Women's Rights with Human Rights and called for the liberation of "Black women, Native Women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, Muslim women, Lesbian, queer and, trans women," whose perspectives had too often been ignored or excluded from the predominately white mainstream women's movement in the past. The demonstration represented a massive intergenerational protest of women, transgendered, and men from 50 states who, having donned their hand-made knitted and crocheted pink pussy hats, gathered to brandish their posters such as "Asian Pacific Islander Queers from San Francisco," "Science is REAL," "Take your BROKEN HEART and make ART." The authors examine… [Direct]
(2018). The Trump Candidacy: Implications for Curriculum. Interchange: A Quarterly Review of Education, v49 n2 p153-160 May. The popular attraction of Donald Trump has been a conundrum for many educators who have tried to understand the rationale behind his support. This article presents a philosophical argument for what this implies for curriculum design and the intellectual temperament of the populace. There has been much written about the purpose of education to prepare students to be knowledgeable participants in the democratic process to further the best interests of the country. The foundational skills of critical thinking are an integral component of that process, and should be reevaluated for how they fit into the current curriculum model. Suggestions for how to integrate critical thinking within the traditional school day are presented, along with the rationale for doing so…. [Direct]
(2017). Branding the Presidency: Trump and the New Politics of Representation. SoJo Journal: Educational Foundations and Social Justice Education, v3 n2 p1-14. This article was prepared for the Critical Media Literacy Conference in Savannah, Georgia in 2016. The central argument of the article is that Donald Trump's candidacy emerges from a new strategy: branding. The author explores the decade prior to Trump's rise and his political forebears, as well as consults critical marketing and television studies to explain how Trump has been able to secure the nomination of the Republican Party despite having little institutional support. Instead, Trump's rise, like that of Sarah Palin and others can be attributed to the use of social media to brand their personalities as political outsiders to establishment politics…. [Direct]
(2021). Why They Hate Us: How Racist Rhetoric Impacts Education. Teachers College Press This book examines how racist political rhetoric has created damaging and dangerous conditions for Students of Color in schools and higher education institutions throughout the United States. The authors show how the election of the 45th president has resulted in a defining moment in U.S. history where racist discourses, reinforced by ideologies of white supremacy, have affected the educational experiences of our most vulnerable students. This volume situates the rhetoric of the Trump presidency within a broader historical narrative and provides recommendations for those who seek to advocate for anti-racism and social justice. As we enter the uncharted waters of a global pandemic and national racial reckoning, this will be invaluable reading for scholars, educators, and administrators who want to be part of the solution. The book features: (1) Uses Donald Trump's presidency as a case study to show how and why racist rhetoric can be used to mobilize large numbers of U.S. voters; (2)… [Direct]
(2021). A Methodological Synergy of Dramatistic Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics: From the Discourse of US Presidents to Trump's 2016 Orlando Speech. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, v17 spec iss 2 p752-772. The present study offers a novel methodology for corpus-based discourse analysis that combines Kenneth Burke's (1968, 1969) dramatistic method of text analysis and the corpus techniques of keyword extraction and concordance reading. Applying the methodology, a two-stage analysis of Donald Trump's 2016 Orlando speech has been conducted: First, at a micro level, (i) the keywords used by Trump were identified in his speech as compared against the historical reference corpus of US Presidents through WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2012), and (ii) Trump's keyword lexical structures were described and interpreted in the pentadic ratios rhetorically motivated by the "terministic screens" that select and deflect representations of the gay-nightclub-shooting event in the speech; second, at a macro level, the process of substantiating the whole speech event of Orlando was implemented in terms of the different types of substance — geometric, familial, and directional — recognized in the… [PDF]
(2018). A Harvard Attorney Whose Job Is Advising Undocumented Students in the Age of Trump. New England Journal of Higher Education, Apr. As an immigration attorney for the past 14 years in both private practice and legal services, the author feels confident in saying there is not a "single" kind of immigrant or one kind of immigration story. There are multifarious individuals and families of diverse global origin bearing a cornucopia of ideas, perspectives, hopes and dreams. This past year, the author was given another vantage point to observe the manifold immigration experience when he was hired by Harvard University to provide legal representation to its DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and undocumented students in order to prepare for the anti-immigrant threats that Donald Trump made on the campaign trail. In this article, the author shares his experience…. [Direct]
(2019). "L'esprit Critique" in the Era of Fake News and Alternative Facts. Journal of College Reading and Learning, v49 n3 p260-265. In this short piece, the author provides some background on critical thinking and reading in the unprecedented times of the Donald J. Trump administration where truth is gleaned only through careful consideration of multiple perspectives and sources. Readers will learn more about the French "esprit critique" as a means to teaching critical inquiry, particularly in the postsecondary classroom…. [Direct]
(2017). Teaching after Trump. International Journal of Leadership in Education, v20 n3 p371-375. In this commentary, author Erica McWilliam asserts that the 2016 victory of Donald Trump in the US election is a global punch to all teachers who value pluralism and human dignity. She further maintains Trump's wild card entry into the White House directly threatens the values that teachers attempt to impart to their students–such as democracy, respect for the law, the dignity of every man regardless of origin, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views. More than that, McWilliam argues that the Trump victory threatens the very idea that being educated is "in itself" a good thing…. [Direct]
(2018). Teaching Trump: A Case Study of Two Teachers and the Election of 2016. Social Studies, v109 n2 p101-111. This case study investigated how two 8th-grade teachers planned for, delivered, and reflected on their teaching of the 2016 Presidential Election. Data sources included classroom observations, teacher interviews, and lesson plans. Despite integrating student-centered lessons about the election with social and political events in US History from 1792-1861, one teacher, Ms. Smith, struggled to navigate burgeoning issues that galvanized students. During the six-week unit, both teachers maintained neutral positions on the candidates; however, after the election, Ms. Smith allowed her disdain for Donald Trump to seep into her teaching. Because exigent political events, such as presidential elections, hold great potential to accelerate students' political socialization, more needs to be learned about how teachers do and should manage the teaching of controversial issues in the social classroom…. [Direct]
(2017). Understanding and Undermining Fake News from the Classroom. Berkeley Review of Education, v7 n1 p105-112 Jan. It's too soon to know what will define Donald Trump's presidency, but one of the defining characteristics of his campaign was a near-total disregard for facts. According to PolitiFact ("Donald Trump's file," n.d.), about 70% of Trump's statements have been either mostly false, completely false, or outright lies. Candidate Trump wasn't the only one dealing in dishonesty, but the ubiquity of falsehood surrounding his election contributed to the Oxford Dictionaries naming "post-truth" its 2016 Word of the Year. Fake news (Drobnic Holan, 2016) might be the most pernicious form of post-truth. PolitiFact called fake news its Lie of the Year, pointing out that fake news is "the boldest sign of a post-truth society" (para. 12) and that it "found a willing enabler in Trump" (para. 8). Americans should perceive this phenomenon as an existential threat to democracy. What truths remain self-evident if truth itself becomes counterfeit? A post-truth society… [PDF]
(2017). Doing Counterwork in the Age of a Counterfeit President: Resisting a Trump-DeVos Education Agenda. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE), v30 n10 p912-919. In this article, we explore and conceptualize "counterwork" in education as a critical element for resistance and progressive social change in the era of Donald Trump's presidency. We first discuss education in the context of a Trump-DeVos administration, and how this milieu necessitates activist research and counterwork. Grounded in a sense of critical hope and part of a larger anti-hegemonic project, we describe our conceptualization of counterwork in education as unfinishedness and the critical imagination, human agency, and transformational resistance for liberation. This approach to education is committed to sustaining an anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and a critical social justice agenda in education across the P-20 spectrum… [Direct]
(2018). What Is the Role of Higher Education in Authoritarian Times?. Scottish Educational Review, v50 n1 p3-17. Donald Trump's ascendancy in American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason that has been decades in the making; it also points to the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life, and the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship. Galvanizing his base of true-believers in post-election demonstrations, the world is witnessing how a politics of bigotry and hate is transformed into a spectacle of fear, divisions, and disinformation. Under President Trump, the scourge of mid-20th century authoritarianism has returned not only in the menacing plague of populist rallies, fear-mongering, hate, and humiliation, but also in an emboldened culture of war, militarization, and violence that looms over society like a rising storm. This article looks at the role of higher education in authoritarian times…. [Direct]
(2017). Centering Transborder Students: Perspectives on Identity, Languaging and Schooling between the U.S. and Mexico. Multicultural Perspectives, v19 n2 p76-84. Undocumented families' rates of repatriation to Mexico from the United States have risen throughout the Obama administration, and this trend will likely increase under Donald Trump. This study describes the experiences of Mexican-born youth who grew up in the United States and are back in Mexico. While these children are participants in their families' migration, their input is rarely sought in decisions to leave or return to a country. This article shares transborder students' voices on their struggles to find their identities as Mexican, American, or some combination of the two. They reflect on their schooling experiences across countries, and how these challenges are compounded when they are new to learning in Spanish or indigenous languages in Mexico…. [Direct]
(2016). A Critical Discourse Analysis of Donald Trump's Sexist Ideology. Journal of Education and Practice, v7 n30 p87-95. Language is not always seen as a neutral vehicle which represents reality. It is sometimes described as a tool which is drawn on to discriminate, insult, abuse, and belittle others. This is evident in the case of sexism which is seen as language that discriminates against women by representing them negatively or which seems to implicitly assume that activities primarily associated with women are necessarily trivial. Thus, language is described as a potential that is drawn on strategically by sexists to devalue or marginalize women. The current paper is a critical discourse analysis of Donald Trump's negative evaluation of women. It sheds light on his sexist ideology to negatively represent and underestimate women. It aims to investigate the structural, lexical, and rhetorical strategies that are utilized for this purpose. For this end, the researcher will analyze some of Trump's opinions concerning women in different occasions drawing upon an eclectic model adopted from Mill's (2008)… [PDF]
(2018). Truth, Masculinity and the Anti-Elitist Backlash against the University in the Age of Trump. Teaching in Higher Education, v23 n5 p593-605. The global rise of 'neo-populism', culminating in the election of the populist Republican candidate Donald Trump to the US presidency, has been accompanied by a notable backlash and resistance to what has been categorised as governing/dominating 'elites', including HE academic institutions. Populist critiques centre on a perceived climate of censorship on campus in the name of 'political correctness'. In this paper I examine some of the arguments put forward by proponents and detractors in these debates, utlising some examples from empirical data from a study of online student newspaper posts in 2016 and 2017 from campuses in the US and the UK. In doing so I will be exploring the ways in which the debates are underpinned by distinct gendered, classed and 'raced' discourses that are linked not only to differing conceptions of 'truth' but also the nature and purpose of learning in the university itself…. [Direct]