This essay describes how, as a scholar in gender diverse childhoods, I was collecting ethnographic data at the time of the 2016 election, and how this experience led to a series of jarring personal and professional transformations as a scholar writing for social justice. Not only did find that arts-based methods were particularly apt for capturing…

Maps are a primary method of displaying statistical data that comes from a geographical frame. Maps are esthetically appealing and make it easier to identify geographic patterns in a dataset. However, few introductory statistical texts and courses explicitly present maps as a way to display data. In this article, we will present examples of…

Neoliberalism has become the hegemonic rationality of our time, framing nearly every aspect of our social world in terms of competition. This dissertation sheds light on neoliberal infiltration and naturalization within the field of language education through three distinct but interrelated papers. "In Discourses of Dual Language Bilingual…

Media reports suggest that parent frustration with COVID school policies and the growing politicization of education have increased community engagement with local public schools. However, there is no evidence to date on whether these factors have translated into greater engagement at the ballot box. This paper uses a novel data set to explore how…

This article offers three meditations on the 2016 election of Donald Trump for consideration by the readers of "Anthropology & Education Quarterly": first, to query what is "new" about this political era; second, to draw attention to the performance of political opposition and violences of solidarity; third, to document my…

Recent studies on student politics and governance have shown that electoral clientelism (EC) in university student elections is often facilitated by clientelist relations between student leaders and political parties. However, there is a dearth of empirical research investigating the various forms of electoral clientelism, as manifested through…

College experiences can contribute to teaching, learning, and instruction within higher education. The framework for this essay treats the college community as prototypic of the U.S. political society. Several aspects of the national political culture have been approximated within a collegiate culture. For example, every political problem within…

Student participation in higher education governance is low in most countries. This is puzzling especially in countries like Czechia that have established radically democratic academic structures open to student involvement. This article therefore seeks to explain the determinants of student turnout (an important form of student participation) in…

This essay concerns the political and social psychological roots of the White American electorate's decision to elect Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States in 2016. The author explains how the Trump presidency is an iconoclastic reaction by the White American electorate to the country's first African American president, Barack…

Elections in fledgling democracies are punctuated by perceived and observed cases of vote buying otherwise also called electoral clientelism -- regarded as a major threat to democratic consolidation. Notions of vote buying are variously captured in the burgeoning literature on democracy, but the ongoing scholarly discussions have failed to engage…

"Outside Money in School Board Elections" documents and analyzes the injection of external funding into local elections. Local school board contests have recently become flashpoints of national donor interest. Some observers see this engagement as a needed boost for complacent school districts while others view it as a threat to local…

Governments around the world have privatized public services in the name of efficiency and citizen empowerment, but some argue that privatization could also affect citizen participation in democratic governance. We explore this possibility by estimating the impact of charter schools (which are publicly funded but privately operated) on school…

While U.S. voters delivered a significant change in the 2024 federal elections, they opted for steady leadership at the state level. No state board of education shifted in partisan control, and only five seats saw a shift in political party out of 27 races that were contested in the general election. This policy update looks at the results of…

In this article, I focus on two competing technical communication discourses used to represent the biometric technology Ghana adopted in 2012 and subsequent elections to demonstrate how communication about technology could potentially marginalize local, nondominant knowledge systems whereas it privileges global, dominant knowledge systems.…

The proliferation of political nonprofit organizations since the Citizens United decision has undoubtedly reshaped American politics. These interest groups have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent state and federal elections. Yet, little is known about how these organizations influence higher education politics and the extent to which…