The War on “Cozy Nooks”: Sold a Story, State Reading Legislation, and White Racial Violence

• In Event: Critical Policy Analyses on White Racial Violence and Censorship

Abstract

Emily Hanford’s (2022) podcast Sold a Story has impacted reading legislation and the ways new reading policies are being enacted in classrooms across the U.S. (Suskind, 2022). Hanford reinvigorated our country’s “reading wars” by criticizing progressive approaches and heralding traditional phonics-oriented teaching, now rebranded as the “Science of Reading” (Thomas, 2022). In this paper, we analyze the “weaponized discourses “(Herrera & Bryan, 2022) that Hanford uses. We also analyze the ways these discourses were performed (Wodak, 2009) by Minnesota House Representatives as they negotiated the state’s Read Act in spring 2023. We demonstrate that these performances included acts of symbolic violence grounded in white fears of interracial intimacy (Irby, 2014), with negative implications for redressing racial disparities in education.

Authors

• Rick J. Lybeck, Minnesota State University - Mankato

• Audrey Lensmire, Augsburg University