The day after Trump won the election, I went into my class as usual. I was setting up the smart podium, when a student in the first row turned back to another student to chat. I couldn’t overhear everything that went on between the two of them, but I did hear the student in the first row loudly exclaim “Well if you don’t like it; you can go to Canada.” Even though it was before class time, I gave this student the side-eye, wagged my finger at them and said “we don’t use that kind of language in this classroom. We’re going to practice being polite to each other in here!” The student apologized to me and class began. I don’t know if they apologized to the other student. This was the first day after the election and I wish I could say that this was the last time I heard exclusionary language in my classes. But I wasn’t surprised; throughout that semester I had been teaching to red ‘Make American Great Again’ hats.

I teach at a rural university in Minnesota where I am the only anthropologist on campus. It is not as much cache as it sounds. I teach large service courses where students in my classes are there only for the liberal education credits they receive. Most neither know nor care what anthropology is, and if anything, are prepared for college only as a hostile climate that may challenge their faith, their belief in creationism, their comfort with their ideas and self image. I wish I could say that this is a Trump-era problem, but the fact is that my classes at this university have always been this way. Barring a few welcome exceptions, students are not interested in learning anything that challenges their worldview, and certainly not from a foreign woman with an accent, who isn’t even Christian.
Post-election, when it feels like the entire climate in the country has shifted to resemble one I normally face in my classroom, I’m contemplating how we, as anthropology professors can continue to teach. Whom do we teach now, and to what purpose?

Teaching things students care about
My first proposition is that we understand why our students are in our class. This isn’t anything new or anything we don’t already do. However, I propose a more realistic organization of our syllabi (at least for introductory, service courses) to acknowledge that our students may not necessarily be in our classes for edification. It is time to not take this personally (easier said than done, I confess). If we are the evils in their path to a “practical” degree that will get them a job, what can we teach them that they care about?
I most often teach introductory classes in cultural anthropology and it is here that I am most successfully able to argue that anthropology offers insight into their lives. I set out to explain what anthropology is and how it may help them understand some things about their own lives I teach about social stratification and talk about race and ethnicity. It is usually a big revelation to the students that race is in fact not a biological categorization of people but a social one. Discussions on economic inequality are also rewarding. It is easy to frame student concerns about finding jobs after graduation into a discussion on Marx, analysis of capitalism and outsourcing. We discuss global competition, sectors of job growth in the US economy, the percentage of the population with degrees required to acquire jobs in these growth sectors. It gives student a clear, practical insight into what they are doing in college and the nature of the economy that they will participate in after graduation. Teaching about the Kula ring also goes much easier once we have established that members of any particular society will work hard to participate in the various forms of economic transaction of that society.
It is of course ridiculous to imagine that the entire anthropology curriculum be based on students’ grudging interests. However, for the students who take only one anthropology class in their lives, this may contribute to the continued relevance of anthropology to their lives.

Hold Trump accountable
In the weeks leading up to the election, I tried to avoid discussions on Trump’s campaign. I was not always successful in doing this, and so I tried to discuss the campaign promises of both Clinton and Trump in light of what these would mean for the students. I wanted to be respectful of my students’ choices and so whenever I discussed any of these issues, I reframed them into anthropologically accessible terms. I discussed the building of the wall as an issue of nationalism and how national culture is framed in election campaigns. This allowed us to understand what makes up culture and values. The campaign rhetoric made for lively discussions on linguistics, analyzing the formation of meaning via symbols and syntax.

I assigned students to read part of Rousseau’s Social Contract theory to outline how in a democracy freedom is limited through the notion of rights and duties and that freedom is only freedom if there is a system in place that protects it. As anthropology professors I would suggest that our job is to help our students understand how their political action or inaction will impact their own life, and to extend the definition of personal freedom as being entangled in the larger concepts of political freedom. After the election, I propose that we continue in the same vein. That we reframe national politics in terms of rhetoric and symbolic action, and discuss the impact of each political action as it related to student experience. We can train our students to differentiate between words and their impact – to tackle the question of whether Trump is not racist because he tweets that he isn’t; or analyze his actions as he fills his cabinet with white supremacists.
I propose that we teach every single person in our classrooms, be they Trump supporters or not, to understand freedom as a cherished political principle that requires care and effort on our parts to maintain. That we teach our students about civic society, about their own rights and their responsibility in maintaining this right to freedom. That we teach them about racism, misogyny and nativism and how these might get in the way of their own rights being respected. That we teach them about the world around them, and we teach them to navigate in this world. Most importantly, as Trump begins his term, we help students analyze the impact of his governance and how to hold him accountable for his actions.

Center minority viewpoints
It is easy to assume that my work everyday is full of hostility. The truth, however, is that my classes are also full of people who seek me out in corridors, after classes, in office hours and in student evaluations to mention how much they appreciate a professor who speaks about the reality of racism in this country, who assumes that we are all good people and calls on our good selves to support minorities, one who makes injustice visible and points out that the voice of the minorities must also be made central. It is these students who sought me out after the election to express their disappointment, to discuss how they could argue with their aunts, their parents, their community that even though Trump has promised a thousand and one things to make their lives better, it is unlikely that he is going to live up to his promise. And so I struggle with these students to find the words that will help them carry on.
My plan is quite simple – that we simply ask students to think of how they would want to be treated and help them figure out what the humanitarian cost of their wishes would be. While discussing how nation states creates communities oriented in both time and space, my students observed that a certain cadre of conservative politics harked back to “the way things were” in the 1950s. We watched documentaries to understand the schism between White America and minorities at that time, understood how government assistance programs overwhelmingly supported white people’s aspirations for a middle class life and how legalized segregation negatively impacted the lives of minorities. “So they want to go back to a time when the blacks knew their place”, one of my students observed, “but that is so racist”. My observation has been that even the most conservative of students will shy away from ideas that are blatantly racist in their impact today. Be it peer pressure or a real change in values, I find that even the conservative student of today is unwilling to engage in actions that are openly discriminatory.

For the most part then, I suggest that as anthropologists we use our agency to talk about the negative impact of actions and to break through the barrier of unawareness that allows students to remain conservative supporters. The answer may well lie in the history of anthropology itself. Anthropology as a discipline has always tried to give voice to minority viewpoints and the others of history. One of the most effective ways to be anthropology professors in the Time of Trump may be to simply continue teaching the discipline.

Teaching everyone in the class, not simply students we agree with.
Professors all over the country have lamented the election results, expressed shock and dismay and even shed tears in classrooms. At a board meeting in the recent American Anthropological Association’s annual conference, I listened to one anthropology professor who taught in a situation similar to mine express how she was in tears in the classroom the day after the election. She lamented that anthropology journals were not more accessible to students and that even though we had a lot to offer our students, our jargon prevented students from learning anything. Here I part ways with her. I have sympathy for her dashed hopes, but I strongly disagree with her actions – both in shedding tears in the classroom and in arguing that anthropology is inaccessible to our students. It is our job as professors to make the subject accessible to our students, no matter what level of preparation they have. It will take time, it will take effort; but it is important to work with our students and help them undertake the task of understanding difficult texts.
We cannot be successful as faculty if our language is inaccessible, our thoughts inscrutable and our principles unassailable. I propose with teach with care, with kindness and invite students to participate in exploring the values of diversity and respect that are central to anthropology.

Respect our students’ democratic choices
It is also our job as anthropology professors to respect the choices that students make. And so while the election results are indeed filling us with anxiety about the future, it is important to keep our tears away from the classroom.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, my classroom took on an odd sort of dynamic. Students who had voted for Trump (some of these students had self-disclosed) and students who were minorities all displayed signs of anxiety and doubled down on their opinion. I’ve discovered through intense class discussion that much of this behavior comes from imagined opposition to their viewpoints. And here, as professors we can demonstrate support for our students’ choices, regardless of whom they voted for.
Verbal reassurance is meaningless in the face of partisan reaction to students’ opinions and so I have been trying to reframe classes as simply issue-based. One of the modules in my class covered globalization and food. We watched Michael Pollan’s “The omnivore’s dilemma” to understand food supply chains in the US. As a class, this led to several interesting discussions on how we choose to eat and what we expect to be available to us as food. Students on both sides of the aisle devised strategies to eat local and to reduce the carbon footprint of our food. In the end, I think students surprised themselves by discovering how much common ground they had when the discussion was issue-based rather than framed by their identity as a Trump voter or hater. My job was to simply figure out a way in which students could realize their common interests.

In the end, I propose a simple solution – that we continue to teach. That we continue to teach every single person in our classroom, to the best of our ability. That we display the same duty of care to each of our students, no matter what their religious or political or social persuasion. That we hold ourselves accountable for the education we provide, and for making anthropology relevant to the lives of our students.

Rucha Ambikar is assistant professor of sociology at Bemidji State University. She holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Her current research interests include race, pedagogy and identity.

I taught a class on the 2016 U.S. presidential election (syllabus here) to a group of undergrads at MIT with diverse political commitments, social sensibilities, and with different levels of exposure to anthropology. I faced two challenges. One was getting my students to think anthropologically about electoral politics and democracy more broadly. I mean moving away from analyses that mimic prevalent political punditry (do elections work?), to a comparative mode of analysis attentive to how different groups of people experience, understand and perform free, fair, legitimate elections. The second challenge was to build a common ground to listen to each other in an emotionally charged political environment. I found that in cultivating an anthropological perspective we built a common place to question the assumptions shaping our political preferences, and to discuss the implications of those preferences.

I made an effort to cultivate in my students what Clifford (1988:19) calls an “ethnographic attitude,”  one that sees “culture and its norms—beauty, truth, reality—as artificial arrangements susceptible to detached analysis and comparison with other possible dispositions.” This “relativistic” approach (and I mean it facetiously) was fruitful to study electoral campaigning in its own terms. As charismatic assemblages—of experts, supporters, techniques, political ideals, political networks and media infrastructures—working in concerted action toward electing a candidate (Nielsen 2012; Stromer-Galley 2014). We saw that these assemblages deploy strict top-down management tactics to fuel and spread a collective enthusiasm for a political cause, and produce dominant storylines that ultimately become the bases for political judgment and policy design (Laclau 2008). 2016 provided abundant case studies, like Brexit or the Colombian Peace Referendum.

I organized the class syllabus with a comparative perspective in mind, and informed by my own work in Colombia.  I study the rise of an American-style of political management. As a Colombian, studying American electoral management practices in my home country, I have seen that the American style of campaigning—which is candidate-centered, dependent on vertical information practices and based on popular participation—looks a lot like what has been called populism in the global south. I purposefully organized the readings to compare ideas and practices of political authority and democratic consensus in time and with other contexts, and especially in light of shifting media infrastructures.

Schudson’s (1998) The Good Citizen, and Lakoff’s (1996) Moral Politics were great resources to outline a tension that runs deep in American political history between consensus and political authority, between an expectation of egalitarianism and a representation system organized around social deference.  Schudson especially helped us understand that this system relies heavily on political communication, on arguments and persuasion, and gave us an overview of the historical processes, of technological and institutional shifts leading to our media-intensive, celebrity-centered political culture.

We focused on the emergence of professional political campaigning and the public relations industry in the 1920s, what’s commonly known as “modern campaigning.” Here, we examined the rise of the citizen/consumer and the marriage of advertisement, demography, and electoral campaigning through a mix of ethnographic and political communication works. Lempert and Silverstein’s (2012) Creatures of Politics and Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram’s (2016) recent article “The Hands of Donald Trump” were great resources to study candidate branding and political spectacle. Rasmus Nielsen (2012) Ground Wars, Sasha Issenberg’s (2012) Victory Lab, and Stromer-Galley’s Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age were useful texts to study political communication techniques (for example like micro-targeting or controlled interactivity), the types of relations they prefigure, and their relationship to dominant social structures. We learned, for example, that campaigns select canvassers based on ideas of race and class, limiting the opportunities for participation for volunteers (an expression of institutionalized racism).

We read ethnographic works about elections in other contexts, and social theory texts to question the colonial history of democracy, and its “provincialization.” Texts like Kim Coles (2007), Democratic Designs, Mukulika Banerjee’s (2008) “Democracy, Sacred and Everyday”, Jeffrey Witsoe’s (2013) Democracy Against Development, Julia Paley’s (2004) “Accountable Democracy,” and Pierre Bourdieu’s (2004) “The Mystery of the Ministry” sparked productive discussions about the social relations produced and reproduced through electoral campaigning. Through these discussions, we questioned Donald Trump not only as a product of socioeconomic trends and racial histories, but also as a catalyzer of new political narratives and institutional conditions.

I found that discussing ethnographic assignments in class and comparing findings helped us talk about our political stakes openly, and think together about the implication of our preferences. From the outset, I voiced freely my rejection of Trump (as a hispanic immigrant, recent citizen, and as a woman). But, I also openly recognized that mine was a preference among many and that in class we’d peer into the assumptions informing our preferences.

I assigned a semester long mini-ethnography. Students had to choose a site exclusively activated during elections. Some students chose digital sites, some chose comedy shows, others chose to go to political rallies. Students often shared their findings coded in an emotional register, expressing feelings of excitement/identification or discomfort/rejection. We studied that emotional responses to politics reflect ideals of political virtue and fairness that take different shapes depending on the ideological camp that’s making the claim to virtue (thank you, George Lakoff!). Fighting against relativism, we compared notes. And we questioned each other. For example, can we simultaneously have policies that are good for business and that threaten our environmental systems? Are the social effects of economic policies ‘trade-offs’? Who’s trading and at what expense? How are technocrats more right about policy than someone who feels its effects?

Regardless of political leaning, the day after Trump won, in class we sat with our emotions and listened to our arguments. If elections are “rituals of renewal,” of giving birth to a common political imagination, what do current political polarization and social tensions say about the kind of “renewal” we’re witnessing? We thought it might be time to devise new ways of connecting politically. We don’t have a definite answer. But the classroom, and I mean the open, face-to-face, know-your-peers type of classroom, may be instrumental in this endeavor.

Acknowledgements: Special thanks to my students, Alex, Charles, Gustavo, Noa, Piper, Sarah and Sean, for the thoughtful discussions and generous exchanges.

Lots of us who teach in the U.S. (and, doubtless, in other places) have been asking dazed questions about how, and if, we should hold classes, what can we do with and for our students, and what responsibilities we have to teach to this event that so many of us are experiencing (in variously positioned and intersecting ways) as a disaster?

This morning, in my Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology Class, I devoted the class to reflecting (with some tears) on the climate of permissible violence targeted at those bodies the Trump campaign singled out for hate and disregard during the election, hearing from students about their concerns, and thinking about what resources different students have to safely respond and to enact civic engagement and community care. Then I gave them a mini-teach in about #cripthevote and the way the block granting of Medicaid and repeal of the ACA could literally kill people.

For those of us who teach, #teachingthedisaster will depend on who our students are, what kind of expertise we can bring to lectern/table/office hour/quad, as well as our own institutional, geographical, and sociopolitical location.

Yesterday, I reached out to colleagues to begin soliciting resources that might help each of us figure out our own approach. I’m grateful for the many rapid responses I got, both for their content and also because they manifested a heartening sense of action, which I think we all need right now. Thanks to everyone who emailed and tweeted their contributions. Below is a roughly organized (and by no means complete) collection, one to which I hope you will add.

Please share your own post-Trump teaching resources (how to teach, as well as what to teach) on twitter at #teachingthedisaster or add them to the comments section to this post.

In addition to work in my own classes, I’m also organizing a teach-in for on inauguration day, Friday January 20th. I’d urge those of you in a position to do so to do the same at your intuitions. Let’s make inauguration day a national higher ed day of action. (I know that should have ended with an exclamation point, but it will take me a few more days to muster the energy)

Why to Teach

• Marshall Sahlin’s reflections from the height of the Iraq war on Teach Ins in The Old Stoned Age
• “The Trump Effect” in schools.
• Seth Holmes reflections on Discussing the Suffering Slot with Migrant Farm Workers reminds us that injustice requires for concepts, as well as for action.
• Paul Stoller argues that, in the face of the failure of forms of quantitative knowledge, “Now is the time for ethnographers to step up.”

How to Teach

• There is a world of teaching literature on the subject of “difficult dialogues.” Here is a helpful primer from Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching.
• Though it’s geared toward k-12 education, Tolerance.Org offers helpful general classroom strategies on teaching the days after the election.
• The African American Intellectual History Society created as set of assignments to go with the Trump 2.0 Syllabus (see below). Some of the most adaptable to Anthropology include:
  • Ask students to select a Trump property (current or former) and write a paper on its history of labor/client/neighborhood relations, from development to operation/sale [David Huyssen]Ask students to construct an idea/intellectual map using one Trump’s speeches, tracing where ideas come from historically and noting connection to other primary/secondary sources assigned in the course. [Brian Goldstein]Analyzing one of Trump’s interviews, ask students to highlight the overlapping dimensions of racism, sexism, and xenophobia. [Jeff Helgeson]
• Disability activist and organizer Stacey Milbern posted a few tools for Social Justice Groups/Classrooms this week, including:

Pass out pen and paper to everyone. Invite people to write a letter about this moment. Ask people to not personalize the letters or provide identifying information, but write them for anyone who may be hurting in this moment. Invite people to bring the letter to you (or a co-facilitator) if they’d like. Redistribute the letters anonymously and give time for people to read them. Invite people to read the letter they received to the group if they’d like to share.

What to Teach

On Blackness and Anti-Black Racism

•  Trump 2.0 Syllabus. This may be the best single resource I’ve come across. Created by N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain and others at PublicBooks.Org, it is a historical, cultural, and political contextualization of the rise of Trump. The 15 units (each with accompanying Trump epitaph) include secondary sources plus a selection of primary and multimedia sources.
• The Black Lives Matter Syllabus, created by Frank Roberts at NYU. This syllabus focuses specifically on the BLM movement. Like the Trump 2.0 syllabus, it includes lots of primary sources as well as assignments.
• #Blacklivesmattersyllabus project from Anthropoliteia, edited by Sameena Mulla. Less specifically about the BLM movement itself, this series offers readings and assignments as well as pedagogical reflections from anthologists working on and teaching about blackness in the contemporary US.
• Ta-Nehisi Cotes. Both his “Case for Reparations” and Between the World and Me have been cropping up on anthro syllabi on a range of topics, including my own, to foster thinking about race and history in the US and the related the workings of embodiment and dispossession.

US-Mexico:

• Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail by Jason De Leon focuses on the way the necroviolence of the US border policy takes hold of the bodies of those who policy compels to come north across the Sonoran desert. It just won the AAA’s Marget Mead Award.
• Seth Holmes‘ Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farm Workers in the United States  also focuses on bodies, but here, they are the bodies of undocumented migrant agricultural workers whose suffering and precarity is essential to the US economic and gustatory status quo.

Disability: 

• #Cripthevote. If you’re on twitter, this hashtag, created by Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project with Andrew Pulrang, and Gregg Beratan,  is an amazing archive of disabled and ally voices.
• #Cripthevote: What’s the Crisis of Liberalism Got to Do with It is Faye Ginsberg and Rayna Rapp’s contribution to the CA Crisis of Liberalism Hotspot (see below), describing the role of disability engagement in the 2016 election.
• Ari Ne’man, co-founder of the Autistic Self-Advocasy Network and member of the National Council on Disability (for as long as it exists…), just wrote a perfect primer about how the repeal of the ACA and proposed block granting of Medicaid will endanger and kill disabled people. This is a must teach.
• Liz Lewis’ blog Disability Fieldnotes is a great resource both for reflective thinking about what an anthropology of disability in the U.S. might do, and also for insight, facts and figures.

How Could This Happen?

• Sarah Kendzior predicted Trump’s triumph last May, giving an account of his exploitation of American pain.
• Paul Stoller offers this on culture as an explanatory force. Though I  bristle at his mobilization of a simplified culture concept in this piece, it might serve one well in the class room with a little deconstruction.
• Lilith Mahmod’s Crisis of Liberalism piece We Have Never Been Liberal, explores the way liberalism contains the conditions of possibility for fascism, both in Europe and the U.S.

The Crisis of Liberalism

• Cultural Anthropology’s Crisis of Liberalism Hotspot  is hot off the press. This collection of short essays from Ulf Hannez, Andrea Mulebach, Doug Holmes and others (including SM’s own Alex Golub), has arrived just in time to help us think critically and comparatively about “our present and recent seasons of political discontent.”
  

The following people contributed resources for this list: Vincanne Adams, Lindsay Bell, Dominic Boyer, Christopher Chan, Seth Holmes, Cymene Howe, Kevin Karpiak, Ashley Lebner, Ken MacLeish, Carol Mcgranahan, Andrea Mulebach, and Jenny Shaw.