The contentious campaign, election and presidency of Donald Trump have yielded two inextricable phenomena. On one hand, readers across the globe confront a daily onslaught of events, information and misinformation; on the other, we have seen a similar glut of affective and politically active responses and commentary—on both sides of the issue. This maelstrom of information has overwhelmed traditional forms of scholarship that rely on time, reflection, and hindsight to process.
In this spirit, Contemporaries at Post45 is launching a series of atypical critical pieces that directly address this moment of political turmoil and attendant questions about the public value of intellectual work. What is the role of critique in the Trump era? How might we make scholarly modes of critical thinking not just available, but necessary to readers who aren’t already invested in them?
We invite short collaborative essays, dialogues, arguments, creative critical works, and other forms of scholarship that emphasize interdisciplinarity and build new coalitions both in and out of the academy. Through sustained, creative and participatory critical inquiry, we hope to not only analyze this outpouring of writing and activism, but also reevaluate the modes of critique and analysis available to us as scholars, political actors, artists, and teachers.
We invite pieces of 1500-2500 words, with flexibility depending on form, to be submitted on a rolling basis beginning in November 2017 with the goal of beginning publication in January 2018, a year into Trump’s presidency. This series of pieces is a means, not an end—a call for experimental beginnings, in the hopes of seizing on new ideas and giving them space to develop. Please email submissions, with 1-2 sentence bios for each contributing author, to gwald at gwu.edu and thomasdolan at gwu.edu.