Talking Politics

(By Jeremy A. Rud, guest author) What do Donald Trump, George Santos, and every migrant applying for asylum in the United States have in common? They’ve all recently been charged with fraud. Rather than defaming abuse victims , defrauding campaign donors, or lying to Congress , asylum seekers face much subtler accusations: that their stories are untrue and their experiences insufficient to deserve life in the United States as refugees. Our global system of rigid national borders does more than divide territories. It also restricts access to resources and human rights by categorizing people. In many ways, our political and social institutions make this unavoidable. An immigration system that legally distinguishes refugees from other migrants requires categorization. Categorization requires a comparison between an individual’s claim and a legal definition, which results in an asylum adjudication—an official decision about whether that individual does or does not belong to the category of...

(By Yookyeong Im, guest author) Rainbow and BLM Banners Hung on the U.S. Embassy in South Korea…and Removed Content advisory: mentions of anti-Black violence and police brutality, quotations of anti-queer slogans On June 1, 2020, the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, South Korea hung a large rainbow flag on its building to celebrate LGBT Pride Month. The flag was supposed to stay throughout June. However, it was removed after only two weeks.  The rainbow flag was not the only flag removed from the façade of the embassy building that day. Embassy staff also removed a large Black Lives Matter banner which had been displayed since June 13. According to media reports, the U.S. State Department might have requested the removals because of restrictions that prohibited local U.S. embassies to fly a rainbow flag on their flagpoles in Germany, Israel, Belarus, and many other countries. The State Department explained the reason for its request to remove the BLM banner by asserting that “Black Lives Ma...

  (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 Anita Zandstra, guest author) |  Lea la entrada de blog en español “I am rubber and you are glue; whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” – American playground chant Despite the glib tone of the mantra above, words can be extremely harmful. This is true not only on the schoolyard and playground, but also in politics. However, the very act of using this saying reveals a kernel of truth: there are ways to respond to an attack, insult, or slur—often using humor—that can deflect criticism from oneself while making the attacker look bad. This political strategy has been used countless times worldwide, but I focus my discussion here on a recent example from Bolivian right/left politics: the “Croaceños” memes, which circulated among Bolivian social media users in November 2022. Above: Screenshot of a TikTok. The text reads, “You are Bolivian but were born in Santa Cruz, so you have double nationality. Let’s go Croatia, dammit!” Above: In a photo posted to Facebo...

  (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 ...