Rex Troumbley, Ph.D.
About Me…
I am a political scientist who studies taboo language, digital media, and how institutions govern political speech. I am currently teaching Government for the Honors College at Houston City College and at Lone Star College-CyFair. I previously taught at Henan University in China and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. I earned my Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Research
Words Without Reason
Taboo Language and the Rise of Algorithmic Governance
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
Colonization.com—Empire Building for a New Digital Age
Flying Past Filters and Firewalls
Bad Language: Emerging Issues in Electronic Discourse
Recent Trends in Adolescent Alcohol Use in Hawaiʻi: 2005-2011
Poverty 2039: Exercises in Pro-Poor Foresight
Hawaiʻi 2060: Visioning Hawaiʻi’s Adaptation to Climate Change
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, and how they can act to change them. I accomplish this by combining political science methods with the tools and cultural texts students already use to engage with their world. The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa recognized my teaching with the Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, its highest teaching honor.
