Rex Troumbley, Ph.D.
About Me…
I recently completed a Visiting Assistant Professorship in the School of International Studies at Henan University. Before my fascinating experiences teaching in China, I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, where I organized the John E. Sawyer Seminar on Platforms of Knowledge and Rice Seminar on Chronotopic Imaginaries. I earned my Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and spent my summers in the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Most Recently…
I’ve been busy working on a book monograph titled Words without Reason exploring the politics of taboo language and institutional attempts to clean up political discourse in the United States.
Research
Words Without Reason
Taboo Language and the Rise of Algorithmic Goverance
This project provides a critical map of the larger historical shift in the U.S. away from the prohibition and censorship of taboo language– from bad spelling and grammar, to obscenity, and racial slurs – towards technical methods of language control or discursive steering. For example, I show how Google SafeSearch’s algorithmic filtering processes are built upon earlier projects to “purify” American English like Noah Webster’s American Dictionary. I found that Webster, like a 19th-century spider bot crawling the Web, copied the content of copyrighted texts into his Dictionary and organized them into a searchable database.
Other examples include Webster making obscenity explicit by changing benign words into obscenities like “whoremonger” (fish seller) into “lewd women” in his censored version of The Holy Bible, judges imagining “community standards” to justify institutional regulations over George Carlin’s broadcast obscenities, and psychiatrists controlling the language of individuals with Tourette’s syndrome by treating patients’ brains as a type of rewritable media. As discourse becomes increasingly mediated by electronic devices and corporate platforms, predictive keyboards and autocomplete algorithms are now controlling expressions before they can be made. I argue that these “pre-speech” digital regulators are fundamentally altering how we decide which expressions count as legitimate political discourse and who counts as a politically eligible member of the American nation.
Publications
Coercive Cyberspaces and Governing Internet Futures
in The Future Internet: Alternative Visions, eds., Jenifer Winter and Ryota Ono. Springer (2015).
Flying Past Filters and Firewalls
Reflections on the Digital World, Urs Gasser et al., eds., Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University (2013).
Bad Language: Emerging Issues in Electronic Discourse
Journal of Futures Studies 17, no. 3 (March 2013): 145-146
Recent Trends in Adolescent Alcohol Use in Hawai‘i: 2005-2011
(with C. Nigg) Hawai‘i Journal of Medicine & Public Health 72.3 (March 2013): 92-98.
Poverty 2039: Exercises in Pro-Poor Foresight
(with H. Frey) Institute for Alternative Futures (2011).
Hawai‘i 2060: Visioning Hawai‘i’s Adaptation to Climate Change
(with H. Frey & S. Yim) Hawai’i State Office of Planning (2011).
Teaching
My primary teaching objective is that students leave my class understanding how power relations organize everything from the trash getting picked up to states going to war. My classes combine political science methods for analyzing power with the tools students find useful for becoming engaged in their world. I was honored to received the Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the highest teaching honor bestowed by the University of Hawaii system.
Academia.edu
Facebook
Twitter