Cultural Anthropology Responds to Trump

Photo by Pax Ahimsa Gethen, licensed under CC BY SA.

For our inaugural Collaboration Studio, we have collected politically relevant content about the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the unfolding of his administration, all published since the fall of 2016. This comprises a remarkably fruitful set of pieces, ranging from a community-created reading list to a podcast and published by a diverse group of scholars including tenure-stream faculty, postdocs, and graduate students.

This Collaboration Studio opens with an AnthroPod episode produced by Tariq Rahman, in which ten scholars speaking at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association just one week after the election, address a range of crucial issues from the fallout of neoliberalism to racialization and its relationship with colonialism. A Dialogues series, edited by Carlos Martínez-Cano, captures other reactions to the election by scholars attending the meeting. A second series, edited by Ned Dostaler and Julia Sizek, offers a crowdsourced reading list of texts for the Trump era, each accompanied by a brief commentary. A Dispatches post by Michael Vicente Pérez provides an anthropological perspective on the successive travel bans affecting the American Muslim community. The Hot Spots series “Crisis of Liberalism,” edited by Dominic Boyer and published just before the 2016 election, provides glimpses of nationalist-populist political movements around the globe, while “The Rise of Trumpism,” edited by Lucas Bessire and David Bond, gathers a series of short essays calling for hope and solidarity against the strengthened hatreds and fractured communities of the American present. Finally, Teaching Tools posts by Julia Sizek, Whitney Russell, Kyle Harp-Rushing, and Camille Frazier present strategies for organizing a teach-in, teaching in the midst of uncertainty, and teaching with hope.

Posts in This Studio

The Shattered Echo Chamber: Experiences of #AmAnth2016 in the Wake of the Election

Member Voices

The Shattered Echo Chamber: Experiences of #AmAnth2016 in the Wake of the Election

As anthropologists convened for the 2016 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, just one week after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential ... More

What Are You Reading? Responses to the Election and Inauguration

Member Voices

What Are You Reading? Responses to the Election and Inauguration

Like many anthropologists, we responded to this postelection moment by turning to books. But confronted by the long lists of readings in crowdsourced syllabi, w... More

Executive Disorder: Living the Ban in Seattle

Member Voices

Executive Disorder: Living the Ban in Seattle

When I first met Rami, I could tell that he was overwhelmed. For the last few months, he and his staff at the Iraqi Community Center of Washington (ICCW) have b... More

Crisis of Liberalism

Hot Spots

Crisis of Liberalism

Is liberalism in crisis? The surge of populist politics—challenging both representation and reason—around the world demands that we pose the question. 2016 has ... More

The Rise of Trumpism

Hot Spots

The Rise of Trumpism

The rise of Donald Trump caught many off-guard. What happened? And what comes next? At least one thing is clear: stark divides are being exposed in social order... More

Anthropologists Teach In

Anthropologists Teach In

Academics have recently called for renewed activism in the face of anti-intellectualism, classism, racism, anti-Semitism, ableism, and misogyny of the Donald Tr... More

Teaching Uncertainty: An Introduction

Teaching Tools

Teaching Uncertainty: An Introduction

In launching a new Teaching Tools series, I wanted to begin by thinking with the generativity of uncertainty, with how uncertainty works politically and sociall... More

Teaching with Hope: An Introduction

Teaching Tools

Teaching with Hope: An Introduction

The language of hope from the 2008 U.S. presidential election seems so distant from the doomsday rhetoric of the election we’ve just experienced. I, like many o... More