Photo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY SA.

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 orders and common understandings of them. This Hot Spots series explores these divides and how they are put to use in order to suggest concrete ways forward for our democracy and our disciplines. To do so, it gathers a set of preliminary provocations, visceral responses, and experimental concept work that collectively pose important—and sometimes uncomfortable—questions about power today. Authored over a span of four weeks by scholars from a range of backgrounds, institutions, and perspectives, these essays take Trumpism seriously—not to lend further force to it, but to demystify its claims to legitimacy. To do so, they make startling connections between present and past inequities, even as they formulate novel insights about what makes this moment distinct. In these ways, the series offers a much-needed corrective to many conventional explanations of the contemporary. The result is an urgent call to think politics, people, and scholarly praxis anew: one that may help guide critical engagements with the present and orient wider commitments to come.

This series joins diverse efforts across the discipline to engage with this moment in various forms and formats, including conference panels, articles, op-eds, organizational initiatives, teach-ins, and innovative scholarship, including forthcoming issues of Anthropological Quarterly and American Ethnologist.

Posts in This Series

Introduction: The Rise of Trumpism

Introduction: The Rise of Trumpism

The rise of Trumpism is a clarifying moment. It is important not primarily because of the candidate or his rhetoric or the social movement that propelled him to... More

Reflections on Trump

Reflections on Trump

Let us remember that Donald Trump was elected by less than one-quarter of the public, and that it is only as the consequence of an outmoded electoral college th... More

First Responses: A To-Do List

First Responses: A To-Do List

Here, I reflect on ways to understand what happened and offer a set of initial provocations that may open up new ways to act against what is to come. These are ... More

Contested Lives and the Specter of Trump

Contested Lives and the Specter of Trump

Amid the postelection anxieties and punditry, the question of reproductive politics is last in line. Downwardly mobile white working-class men and, to some exte... More

A We Like Any Other

A We Like Any Other

The Reverend Jerry Falwell, his hair in a pompadour, his suit tight at the seams, his speech and visage astir with moral outrage, first arrived on the national ... More

Making Rural America Great Again

Making Rural America Great Again

White, conservative, out of touch, boring. Such popular descriptions flatten rural areas, dismissing them in favor of cities better positioned to fulfill the Am... More

Whiteness and the Lengthening Arc toward Justice

Whiteness and the Lengthening Arc toward Justice

When Donald Trump—the candidate whose campaign repeatedly unleashed themes of white supremacy, xenophobia, and patriarchy—emerged as the winner on election nigh... More

The Trumpocalypse and Black Radio

The Trumpocalypse and Black Radio

It’s all been said and written already: the pollsters’ failures, the shock and horror at the electoral triumph of a completely unqualified, fundamentally offe... More

Mine

Mine

There are many kinds of coal—peat, lignite, torbanite, anthracite—but my family comes from bituminous country. On the way across Pennsylvania every summer, we w... More

Trumpets at a Kansas Parade

Trumpets at a Kansas Parade

From my apartment one block away from the main drag here in this Kansas town, I heard drum bands, fire-truck sirens, and loud cheers. Manhattan’s annual veteran... More

Nigger Moments

Nigger Moments

What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a m... More

Politics as Volkation

Politics as Volkation

I teach Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” essay in a course on classical sociological theory at John Jay College in New York. During a recent discussion of t... More

Blind Spots of Liberal Righteousness

Blind Spots of Liberal Righteousness

Popular diagnoses of Hillary Clinton’s loss focus on one fatal flaw: rural and working-class whites voted for Donald Trump. Many who lost out from “globalizatio... More

“Interior Frontiers” as Political Concept, Diagnostic, and Dispositif

“Interior Frontiers” as Political Concept, Diagnostic, and Dispositif

We are in a moment for which we should have been prepared: of distinctions and fears to which we might have been more attentive, of tectonic shifts not readily ... More

Trump Studies

Trump Studies

Consumer confidence is rising, I am told. (False news?) The Dow Jones too. (Ditto?) What a time this is for learning about people, politics, and oneself! The qu... More

Why Did the Rust Belt Flip?

Why Did the Rust Belt Flip?

There were many tipping points in the recent U.S. presidential election: white women who voted in unexpected numbers for Donald Trump, Latinos who voted more he... More