Reflecting on the Political Climate and 2024 Election Cycle

On Thursday, November 21, 2024, at approximately 12:21 pm, a mass shooting took place in the French Quarter of New Orleans that resulted in one person's death and left three others critically injured.1 I, like many other attendees at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, unknowingly stumbled on the crime scene as I walked to my hostel over lunch, stepping over blood and listening to the cries of distraught community members as the chaos unfolded not a block away from the conference hotels. Those cries haunted me as I sat through another round of presentations on communicating for greater regard while the street outside flowed red. The woman who died was only 27 years old. None of the presenters mentioned her or the violence—they rarely do.As Donald Trump's second administration kidnaps student activists like Mahmoud Khalil from university campuses for exercising their first amendment rights to publicly criticize US foreign policy,2 I wonder how much more pretending our discipline, or any discipline in this country for that matter, can do before we are simply mouthpieces for the American fascist empire. Perhaps we always were. We pretended that a mass shooting did not take place as we attended sessions. We pretended that silencing Professor Ahlam Muhtaseb was a fluke.3 We refuse to clean house in our discipline because reputations, prestige, and NDAs matter more than the livability of the most vulnerable among us. Why do we continue to drive out scholars of color, disabled scholars, immigrant scholars, trans and queer scholars, and so many others by refusing to protect them against the violent entities that fund our programs and book deals? How many more graduate students and early career scholars must choose between the work they love and survival? How much more suffering will it take to open the ears and pockets of the academy, of our colleagues? When will we interrogate the ways that our selfish complacency and empty pragmatism may have opened the door for capitalist and fascist ideologies to define us?Polite careerism is dead. The next generation of communication scholars, especially rhetoricians, are on the precipice of a new world where our skills and leadership will be desperately needed to resist eradication. The more privileged among us must be willing to risk our careers to “talk back”4 to fascists and fascist enablers, even if they are our advisors, committee members, colleagues, professors, students, chairs, and deans. We must practice coalitional solidarity and stop pretending away the violence that we see and experience every day. The cost of our degrees and our jobs cannot be our souls. We cannot isolate ourselves from each other and the communities we live in. Our despair and anger must lead to collective action, not political paralysis. Above all, we must stop pretending that the institutions that employ us will save us—the only ones who can save us are each other.5 It is time to infect the academy and force it to become a tool of resistance—or abandon it entirely to do the work elsewhere if (or perhaps when) the time comes.6The 2024 election not only signaled a resurgence of Trumpian politics but also highlighted the ongoing commitment to right-wing agendas, including the attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT). Trump and his administration label DEI and CRT as “radical indoctrination” that must be eliminated from all areas of American society, particularly in K-12 and higher education. For a long time, the realm of (white) academia has enjoyed the protection of presumed academic freedom and censorship safeguards. However, minoritized scholars and students have, especially in Communication Studies and Rhetoric, have always pointed out that (1) the protections of academic freedom are rooted in and given to identities that uphold colonialism and whiteness, and (2) right-wing ideologies would inevitably infiltrate higher education.7 Therefore, I propose a call to (white) rhetorical scholars to remove the elitist mask and make a genuine commitment to listening and action. We need to reinvest in scholarship that addresses the erosion of academic freedom, which clearly aims to silence marginalized voices and ignore systemic racism. Even more so, we must support our minoritized colleagues, students, and communities in ways that go beyond seeking praise or publication. This effort should demonstrate our commitment to collective resistance and solidarity, uniting us against the true sources of oppression, rather than creating divisions among ourselves.We need to revisit and take seriously the call made by Adam Gaudry to embody and practice insurgent community research.9 What is a graduate student to do when they are worried about their trans and nonbinary and undocumented students when (1) we already lack financial stability, (2) we wield relatively little power within our institutional structures, and (3) we are unsure of whether we can count on our university as a safety net when and if we get reprimanded by law enforcement for enacting our first amendment rights and/or enact our freedom(s) to peacefully protect our students from the likes of Immigration and Customs Enforcement? Nikole Hannah-Jones's question rings true outside of that initial Yale classroom that she spoke to when she asked, “Who do we sacrifice to uphold our privilege?”10 Divesting of our privilege seems more important now under another Trumpian presidency, but we (graduate students) cannot be expected to be some legal scapegoats that test the limits of student protection. This call speaks hand-in-hand with Insurgent Community Research, where we place the experiences, livelihoods, pleasure(s), and needs of the folks at the forefront of our research and advocacy endeavors. Put simply, folks need help, and they need help now.I ask us to consider what resources, time, and passion it would take for us to imagine a graduate seminar that dedicates time for street protest, marshaling training, street medic training, lobbying, meeting with grassroots advocacy groups, etc. Theorizing can only get us so far. Staying in theory land poses the risk of losing sight of the material realities quite literally outside of our doors—the separation of families, the stripping and erasure of trans and nonbinary folks and their rights, attacks on the topical research areas that each of us in this forum contributes to, etc. Communication scholars, particularly for this forum, rhetorical scholars within communication studies, cannot lose sight of this political moment.

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