Alt-Organizing: Critical Digital Research, Education, and Movement Conservatives

• In Event: 66.064 - Youth and Community Voice? Perspectives on Challenging a Racial Politics of Inclusion

Abstract

In a YouTube interview, social studies teacher Tianna Dolichov suggested that teachers come together through social media.   She posted her own frustrations with the limits of textbooks; insisted others should share experiences with curriculum and teaching for change, organized an activist teacher network, and ultimately found culturally sustaining alternative schools.  Classroom teachers using alternative and social media to call for change would have been inspiring - had Dolichov not been a member of the Alt-Right and an avowed white supremacist.
In alignment with the current theme “Leveraging Education Research in a ‘Post-Truth’ Era” this paper explores the “reactionary postmodernism” (Callinicos 1990) of the far right.  Right populism shapes postmodernism in new ways, combining populist insistence on individual knowledge with authoritarian insistence on grand narratives of white western history.  Through discourse analysis of conservative media, I ask how right populist educational discourse and organizing co-opts the voices of the left. How does the vocabulary of anti-racist education, or culturally sustaining pedagogy,  re-appear as the language of “race realism”, “western chauvinism”, or “white identity”?
Despite the importance of media in shaping conservative movements (Thrift 2014) there is little close study of contemporary right wing media, racism and education.   Drawing on existing work on media and movement conservatism (Grossberg, 1992; Thrift, 2014), this paper extends existing research conservative grassroots organizing in education (Apple, 1996; Binder, 2009; Binder & Wood, 2012) to explore digital education organizing on the alt-right.   While some work on far right education explores racism historical studies of resistance to desegregation (ie McRae 2018), the majority focuses on christian conservative organizing (ie Binder, 2009) or with little explicit reference to race or popular media.
In this initial media analysis, part of an ethnography of rightist women educators, I explore discourses of education on right wing social media.  I focus on Twitter, and its imitator Gab.ai, an even farther right platform, Facebook groups, and YouTube, which has a very large far right presence.  Using critical and political discourse analysis (Fairclough 2013, Ietcu-Fairclough 2013) and linguo-visual semiotic analysis (Mendoza-Denton 2015) of youtube videos, I explore the visual and verbal construction of rightist beliefs about education.
In rightist discourse, education is a hoary vision of public schools as communist indoctrination centers. The alt-right is distinguished by explicit racism. Co-opting discourses of anti-racism for “race realism”, the vocabulary of critical education has been taken against its values.This paper asks how the right wing has used leftist educational discourse and practice, which also offers implications for how leftist educators can research the right.    How does the participatory framework common in studies of communities and organizing, which minimizes the role and values of the researcher, co-exist with responsibility as critical researchers when studying white supremacist organizing? How can we renew the call local, fine-grained, participatory and ethnographic knowledge in the face of post-truth politics? This paper calls for researchers to make use of critical, engaged methods to study right wing youth movements, to hear their truth in a way that challenges their post-truth politics.    

Author

• Catherine Tebaldi, University of Massachusetts - Amherst