Jamie Longazel is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton. 
 
“Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.” - Mother Jones

After only a week in office, Donald Trump has made it quite clear that we will facing some frightening realities over the next four years. Many of us are scrambling for ways to respond.

I love this Mother Jones quote as a reminder that the lessons can precede the conflict, rather than the other way around.

The particular lesson I always come back to as a scholar-educator-activist is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. For Freire, true liberation – for the oppressed and their oppressors – comes when the oppressed “[learn] to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of that reality.”

I do not think U.S. academics appreciate Freire as much as we should. Most of us are on board with his
critique of the “banking method” of education, but his core political message about education for liberation remains on the margins of academia.  

It could be that the tendency in the Global North is to see education as apolitical. The conventional wisdom equates “political teaching” with imposing your views upon your students. Surging right-wing populism has stretched this narrative even further, in effect politicizing higher education to suit its own agenda. The “Professor Watchlist,” for instance, aims to expose “professors that advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.”
In the face of these criticisms and the parallel assault on facts that in all likelihood will continue to characterize the Trump Administration, it is going to be important that we make clear what makes teaching political and that we make a strong case for why political teaching is so important.

Teaching is a political act when it encourages students to grapple with realities that others choose to ignore, when it draws attention to oppression and gives voice to those who experience it.  

Political teaching also involves thinking about education beyond the confines of the traditional classroom. Not just in service learning or community engagement projects, but also in studying with members of our communities, particularly those who have been unable to access higher education institutions. We ought to be learning together about the forces that keep so many of us down.

As I write, I am beginning my second semester teaching a course that is part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. Inside-Out brings “traditional” college students together with people who are incarcerated to learn side-by-side in a prison setting.

Each week I will travel with students from my predominately white, relatively affluent university to a local men’s correctional facility. The course will unfold under the assumption that we are all equally capable and our voices equally valuable. Experiential knowledge and academic knowledge will have equal weight. Everyone will read the same readings, write the same papers, and participate in the same discussions. Although I will distinguish myself to a degree as the facilitator, I will sit in the circle along with the students, listening, learning, and resisting the urge to lecture.

The title of this particular course is Crime & Inequality. The name may imply an endless string of charts and stats about disparities in punishment, offending, and victimization. However, the crux of what I do is use crime as a jumping off point for an in-depth discussion about identity and oppression.
The focus, therefore, is out of step with traditional criminological approaches focusing on “them” as offenders or the subjects of social control. Rather, guided by a combination of critical writings and our cumulative experiences, we will be looking at issues like criminalization across history, the politics of crime, rape culture, and the criminalization of resistance.

What will gradually get unveiled is how complex, interwoven systems of oppression affect each of us differently. We will all struggle through the difficult reality that we, too, are complicit in such systems. Through deep reflection and honest discussion, we will also come to understand better the roots of our own day-to-day hardships.

The process, more so than the result, is what makes Inside-Out worthy of the label, “transformative education.” The program provides participants with a real-life example of what solidarity across difference looks like. Our experiences with oppressive systems mostly differ, yet I approach this course appreciating the possibility of finding unity in the shared experience of struggle.

Engaging with identity therefore gets us to this point, yet transcending identity is the larger goal.
Education, we might say, imitates life in this way.
​
As we enter a moment of profound uncertainty, it is my hope that life might also imitate this style of education. With truth seeking, reflection, and dialogue all under assault, our task will be to get at the root of our struggles, to become empowered enough to push back, and to stand in solidarity with, learn from, and inspire those who are engaged in struggles of their own. Following the advice of Mother Jones, what we need to do as we prepare is sit down and read – or, better yet, learn – together. 

Click here for part 1.

Teaching Law & Society Through a Transnational Lens

In her recent book, Law and Societies in Global Contexts, Eve Darian-Smith (2013) argues that mainstream law and society instruction has too often limited the scope of “society” to that within the domestic nation-state. This has not been because of narrow foresight, however.  Rather, it was because the field of socio-legal studies was largely shaped by a set of political horizons within which the nation-state predominated as the central scale of social justice claims. Socio-legal scholars have therefore often taught their students about the heroic struggles for rights and equality by labor activists, women, people of color, and queers in seeking recognition or redistribution from the nation state. Yet in the face of an administration that has both amassed its power by rebuking these victories and also seems to foreclose future possibilities of protection, how might we use this as an opportunity to reconsider how we teach about law and society?

Teaching Law & Society in a transnational perspective means situating American law within a history of settler colonialism, a legacy that has persisted most visibly in the recent struggle at Standing Rock. Scholars of settler colonialism have revealed the enduring material logics of sovereignty and offer powerful critiques of the symbolic legitimacy of law. The historical continuity of this analytical perspective offers a frame through which to understand the shifting articulations of law, race, control over territory and resources, and larger transnational struggles for political-economic power. 

A transnational perspective also offers our students a new political horizon from which to understand twenty first century challenges of climate change, refugee migration, and global economic inequality. These issues are the result of shifting geographies of power and new technologies of global governance that are not limited to formal legality. Indicators, standards and other forms of “soft law” have all become important sites of contestation.  Hence, a transnational perspective means teaching students about the wide-ranging forms of legality that now exert control.

As we approach the Age of Trump, socio-legal studies is not only poised to help our students better understand the cotemporary political moment, but also equip them for what will surely be a difficult period for people of color, women, queer, and working class people who have long struggled for basic rights and to improve their working conditions. Understanding these struggles through a transnational context will not only reveal the underlying architectures of power through which domination is exercised, but also enlist new allies that will be important in the struggles to come. 

Matthew Canfield is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, writing his dissertation on food sovereignty and global governance.

If mainstream pundits and scholars weren’t already frightened of Donald Trump, that surely changed during the second presidential debate when he threatened to jail Hillary Clinton. Trump’s off-hand threat to Clinton—“because you’d be in jail”—drew criticism from commentators and scholars across the political spectrum for his clear disregard for the principles of rule of law.  
 
Of course, this was neither the first, nor the only time that he revealed his attitude towards legal principles and conventions. From his unconstitutional calls to round up and deport millions of Muslims, to his rejection of the exoneration of the Central Park 5, to his refusal to abide by the rulings of the National Labor Relations Board, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he holds the same instrumental view of law that he holds for basic facts.
 
Trump’s legal ideology reflects a worldview that reduces everything down to deal-making. Indeed, with over 3,500 legal actions, Trump is America’s most litigious president. Like a socio-legal scholar, Trump understands that law is an arena where “the haves come out ahead,” using lawsuits to bully his critics and workers. His crude legal ideology could easily be described by the Soviet legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis’ critique that the Western “concept of justice is drawn from the exchange relationship, and expresses nothing outside of it.”
 
Yet Trump not only exploits law for his own gain, he has also claimed to speak on behalf of it. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Trump howled “I am the law and order candidate!” against a brooding dark backdrop festooned with American flags. By painting an apocalyptic portrait in which, “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” he drew on the specter of violence and racial anxiety to claim his own authority.
 
Trump’s mimicry of Nixon’s law-and-order rhetoric along with his less-than-subtle racism reflects a world in which some populations—people of color, women, and queers—are more subject to punitive legal measures than others.
 
As we confront the looming horizon of his presidency, how must we address this contradiction? What does this election teach us about law? And, how can we prepare ourselves and our students for the Age of Trump?
 
These questions have been at the top of my mind as I have reflected on the way I teach my undergraduate “Law & Society” course. Trump’s victory came amid a module on law and social change, in which we were examining what historian Carol Anderson has recently termed “White Rage” in response to the Brown decision. While this election appeared to be an echo of the past—a re-entrenchment of white heteropatriarchy in the face of popular uprisings by people of color and legal victories by the LGBT movement—the reduction of this counter-mobilization to racial or sexual antipathy fails to account for the larger political shifts that we are not only seeing domestically, but also globally. 

Anxieties of Power and Racial Populism
 
Seen from a global perspective, Donald Trump’s election, like the Brexit referendum, reflects a rising tide of right-wing political movements that are exploiting popular concerns over declining economic power and long-standing racial anxiety to launch their parties to power. The similarities and shared symbols between these two major votes is instructive.
 
In Britain, Nigel Farage, the former head of the UK Independence Party, stoked the fears of distressed working class Brits about immigrants that, he claimed, were taking over their jobs. Like Trump’s election, the Brexit vote was won by a coalition of white working class voters. Moreover, like Trump’s mantra to “Make America Great Again,” Farage called on Brits make Brexit their “Independence Day” and “take back control.” A giddy photo of Farage and Trump set amidst the gleaming gilded elevator of Trump Tower days after the US election, confirmed Trump’s hope that the US election would be “Brexit times 10.”
 
Both Brexit and Trump—as well as the growing political strength of right-wing nationalist parties in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Brazil—serve as a reminder of the enduring ties between race, national sovereignty, and economic power. Indeed, as post-colonial scholars have demonstrated, sovereignty is often articulated within a grammar of racial difference that serves to secure access to economic resources. In settler colonial states, such as the United States, continued articulations of racial difference are asserted within a global political economic context of declining economic strength.
 
Today, as the economic center of global capitalism pivots away from its former transatlantic axis and domestic economic inequality grows, those workers who once embraced a more egalitarian redistributive economic vision during times of prosperity are now left clinging to the symbolic wages that W.E.B. DuBois referred to as the “psychological wage of whiteness.” (It is no wonder that White Nationalists are now enjoying mainstream popular attention as they celebrate the rise of Trump.) For as economic inequality widens, Trump offered a voice for his white working class supporters’ affective and symbolic sentiments of superiority.
 
As socio-legal scholars, we know that these forms of power—racial, economic, and political—are facilitated by law. Indeed, as critical race theorists such as Ian Lopez have demonstrated, race is a socio-legal construction that has been constituted physically, symbolically, and materially through the violence of law.  Global trade agreements, campaign finance laws, voter suppression, and mass incarceration are critical sites of law that were crucial in constructing neoliberalism. In an Age of Trump, Brexit, and other movements of right-wing populism, these sites will remain essential in constructing new racialized regimes of power.
 
In short, Trump’s election reminds us that we cannot teach Law & Society solely within a domestic context. To do so reproduces a narrative of American exceptionalism that conceals the relationship between race, power, and global political-economic formations. Perhaps more importantly, however, it prevents our students from understanding the global coalitions of solidarity that are increasingly important within a context of global interdependence and governance.