Talking Politics

  (By Joshua Babcock) In this roundtable, four scholars— Taras Fedirko , Jessica Greenberg , Sarah Muir , and Yukun Zeng —explored the divergent meanings and historical transformations in the categories of “left” and “right” across global contexts. Panelists did not approach “left” and “right” as a unitary, universal opposition that can be used to categorize all political phenomena, past and present. Instead, they explored how these categories act as a shortcut for accomplishing political ends—even in situations where the binary isn’t regularly or consistently invoked. Overall, the panelists considered how binary logics work to simplify a range of voices, interests, and projects. They connected these considerations to questions of pedagogy, organizing, and the imperative of developing both nonbinary analytics and political metalanguage. The panelists didn’t try to conclusively answer what “left/right” does or should mean, nor did they try to explain why self-styled “leftist” politi...

  (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 ...

(By the Talking Politics Team) May 5, 4 pm CST Roundtable: Transnational Language Politics, Old and New About the roundtable : What is a mother tongue? What is an indigenous language? Who uses them, who defines them, and who gets included or excluded when their boundaries change? These categories might seem self-evident, but they’re backed by decades – even centuries – of political confusion, contestation, advocacy, activism, study, and institutionalization, both national and transnational. This roundtable’s participants will share how “mother tongue(s)” and “indigenous language(s)” appear across their research, advocacy, and revitalization work, and discuss what is made possible or impossible through these large-scale categories. Flash Presentations + Presenter Bios: Jessica Chandras In 2020, India’s National Education Policy (NEP) featured new provisions designed to integrate mother tongues into all levels of pedagogy for equitable education, yet despite these provisions, the policy ...

(By Kate Arnold-Murray) The military is one of the largest and most politically influential institutions in the United States, and yet its inner workings remain a mystery even among many Americans. As the sociolinguist Edith A. Disler has argued, the military is commonly understood through “the monolithic notion of the military as an arbiter of American masculinity” ( 2008, 20 )—an assumption that continues despite the increasing role of women and visibility of LGBTQ+ servicemembers. In talking about “queering” the military, Dr. Mararac draws on queer theory to show how the U.S. military not only enforces societal norms like masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality, but also has the ability to challenge them. For instance, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (a federal law that prevented the marriages of same-sex couples from federal recognition) in 2013, the U.S. Department of Defense began to give equal rights to same-sex military couples who had go...