The excerpt below featuring Associate Professor Jennifer Evans is from the article “Carleton Professor’s New Fascism Syllabus Collects Timely Readings” by Suzanne Bowness.
As Donald Trump stepped into office, he manifested the latest evidence of a new wave of populism that seems to be sweeping the world. To help people educate themselves on the origins and development of this tide, Carleton History Prof. Jennifer Evans and collaborator Lisa Heineman at the University of Iowa have started a project called the New Fascism Syllabus which aims to collect and curate news and academic articles on populism.
The project was inspired by similar activist-scholar initiatives, including the Charleston Syllabus and Ferguson Syllabus projects that crowd-sourced readings around the topics of racial violence after incidents in those cities.
Evans’s initiative includes the syllabus, a closed Facebook page with more than 400 followers, and a Twitter handle @NewFascSyllabus. It also incorporates an existing blog Thehistoryinquestion.com, which looks at online civic opposition to the populist far right in Germany and North America.
“Through the act of collecting, curating, and making public this sampling of news media sources that analyze the Trump moment through an historical lens, as an American phenomenon but also as part of a global populist turn, we are hoping to provide tangible opportunities for discussion and debate in the classroom and beyond,” says Evans.