(By Sarah Adams)
The Talking Politics event on Friday May 19, 2023, featured a semi-formal conversation between Joshua Babcock and Ilana Gershon. They focused on how the state ignores its citizens in the context of U.S. school boards, analyzing this not as a breakdown but as a design feature of democratic governance. As Babcock and Gershon argued, the U.S. school board is a productive site for looking at the ways the state ignores precisely because it isn’t something that fades into the background: instead, there is endless talk about how ignoring happens, why it happens, and what else might or must be done.
In the talk, the pair did not look at specific political perspectives or issues raised by speakers. Instead, they considered participant structures. These include things like the role relationships between school board members and members of the public; the different opportunities for speaking that get allocated to external experts, to board members, and to members of the public; the demands imposed by different levels of government; and the rigidly, time-bound structure of the public comment period—ultimately, a small portion of the overall school board meeting, but one that nominally offers “the public” the opportunity to participate.
Yet if the school board is structured by ignoring, why do people continue to show up? If school boards are sites where citizens are both invited to participate in hyperlocal democracy, and where they learn to be democratic subjects more broadly, what are people doing and learning? And what do they hope to happen versus what they actually experience?
Here, Babcock and Gershon turned to fiction, asking: how do school boards appear in popular media? How do fictionalized depictions shape what we believe does or should transpire at school board meetings? In other words, how does fiction reveal the things that people desire or expect from democracy?
The conversation ended with a discussion of videos of three fictional school board meetings that together emphasize the importance of this institution as a site of broader social and cultural attention. As Babcock and Gershon stated, in the interplay between fiction and reality, fantasies can spill over and move beyond the school board itself. School boards circulate in popular media, but popular media and broader social and political life can be driven by the actions of school boards, too (the example of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a case in point).
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“School Board Meeting”: Saturday Night Live (2022)
In a 2022 sketch by Saturday Night Live, we see a fantasy centered on the school board meeting, a fantasy about not just ignoring undesirable voices, but also commenting on them explicitly. These comments are directed to participants themselves, informing them not only that they are wasting everyone’s time, but also evaluating them (among other things, as stupid, crazy, and/or incompetent). The biggest fantasy element? The characters who get negatively evaluated to their faces don’t challenge the evaluations. Instead, they almost always acquiesce immediately and yield the floor, accepting both their own ignoring and the school board characters’ moral evaluations.
The Book Ban: “Field of Dreams” (1989)
In the 1989 film “Field of Dreams,” an American sports fantasy about a rural baseball field that attracts the ghosts of famous American baseball players, we are given a scene from a school board meeting where community members demand that undesirable books be banned from their schools. In the scene, Annie, played by Amy Madigan (the wife of the protagonist, played by Kevin Kostner), stands up to Beulah (played by Lee Garlington), the character leading the call for the book ban. Annie interrupts and seizes control of the meeting, ultimately swaying the crowd to her side by calling on them to support what she describes as American “freedom” and “the Constitution” and to oppose “Eva Braun” (Beulah) and the “Stalin”-style censorship she calls for.
As Babcock and Gershon analyzed it, the fantasy here is centered on the desire for (semi-)rational-critical debate and the ability to sway others at a school board meeting through the power of one’s words. Importantly, the outcome that Annie achieves in the clip—getting everyone to raise their hands in support of her position—wouldn’t be procedurally valid or binding in the real world.
“Harper Valley PTA”: Jeannie C. Riley (1968)
In the final fictional example, country music star Jeannie C. Riley musically narrates a clash between a widow and the local parent-teacher association. In the song, the widow’s daughter returns home one day with a letter signed by the PTA Secretary criticizing the mother for her clothing, supposed promiscuity, and other “bad” behaviors. The mother goes to the school board meeting and confronts them directly.
Most of the song’s lyrics consist of Riley’s elaboration of the widow’s detailed enumeration of the school board members’ own vices. Here, the fantasy centers on a desire to use intimate, local knowledge in the setting of the school board as a way to call out powerful others’ hypocrisy and defend one’s own honor. It challenges the reality that exists in most real-world school board meetings, where participants don’t actually know much—if anything—about one another. The song’s chart-topping performance eventually led to the development of a film, TV special, and TV series, pointing to the cache that this fantasy held during the song’s heyday and beyond.
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May 19, 11 am CST
Talking Politics with Joshua Babcock and Ilana Gershon
How Does the State Ignore? The Contested Case of U.S. School Boards, from the Screen to the Meeting Hall
About the Webinar: With the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, public commentary at U.S. school board meetings became an important ideological battleground for citizens to air their dissatisfactions to the state. Entertainment media like SNL reflected this dissatisfaction, crafting comedic fantasies of shutting down the voices of undesirable others. Yet it turns out that the state got there first. This webinar doesn't focus on arguments for or against specific policies. Instead, we ask: how does the state work to ignore (potentially) everyone? What effect does this have on speech in democratic contexts? And how do citizens understand democratic utterances that seem to revolve around voice without uptake in both fictional and real-world genres?
Joshua Babcock is an Associate Fellow at the Center for the Study of Communication and Society and Lecturer in the Departments of Linguistics and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Josh’s research focuses on colonial images as they circulate across media, sites, and scales, from the image of global Singapore to images of the state and (liberal) democracy in the U.S. and Southeast Asia to images of indigeneity among 19th-century migrants from British Malaya to New Orleans.
Ilana Gershon is a professor of anthropology at Rice University. She has conducted fieldwork in New Zealand and the United States with Samoan migrants. She has also written about Maori members of the NZ parliament as well as U.S. corporate practices of hiring and U.S. college students’ uses of new media when breaking up. She is currently involved in a project tentatively titled The Pandemic Workplace, in which she explores what the pandemic reveals about how U.S. workplaces function as incubators for both democratic and autocratic citizens. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren, SSRC, NSF and fellowships at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and Notre Dame’s Institute of Advanced Study.
Moderator: Sarah Adams is a first-year PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder specializing in conversation analysis and sociolinguistics. She is currently working on the development of the Corpus of Language Discrimination in Interaction (CLDI) with Dr. Chase Raymond and others. Her independent research so far is focused on hockey players, identity construction, and sense of belonging to their community of practice.
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