New academic article published!
on the subject of what we teach in higher-ed when it comes to "politics"
Image description: W. E. B. Du Bois on his 95th birthday toasting Kwame Nkrumah and Madame Nkrumah, 95th Birthday celebration, Accra, Ghana, February 23, 1963. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. Wikimedia Commons.
Exciting news! My co-authored academic piece with Kevin Clay & Mie Inouye was just published at The New Political Science journal! The journal itself is published by Duke University Press! If you are interested in reading it, please message me!
Here’s a link to the issue featuring our work by clicking here.
This work took us abut two years to accomplish. This included also having to rewrite portions of it just as I was diagnosed with my neuropathy and Type 2. It was just at the beginning when I was pricking my finger every day to test my blood sugar, freaking out, then having to write as fast as I could, while feeling really really sick, and then of course, trying to NOT think about the insulin shots I’d have to take that same night, which of course, would compel to lay on the couch by 8 pm, just as the Knicks were about to play (this is in late 2024), feeling the medicine sometimes burn inside me. Fun!
Nevertheless, I greatly enjoyed the project itself, and of course, am so appreciative of journals like NPS being around. It’s peer-reviewed but it also includes a range of ideas and theoretical discussions that I feel are missing from other journals in my field, like discussions around capitalism, class, socialism and more radical critiques of racial injustice.
This is an abstract of what we wrote,
As contemporary crises continue to reveal profound divisions among the US polity, it has become increasingly prudent to interrogate “civic education” as the commonsense pedagogical framework for teaching undergraduate students about American politics and pursuing change within it. Social studies education and political science embrace civic education as an “apolitical” framework to transmit disciplinary knowledge to undergraduate learners about society, foreign affairs, and domestic American politics. Readers in both fields generally advance sanguine views of “American democracy” that tacitly legitimize existing relations of power between the worker/citizen and the owner/state. Political education should replace civic education, as it presents the organization of American democracy and political economy as legitimate and foundational sites of inquiry and critique to advance social change.
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