This introduction lays out the research design of a project on the Texas state “Campus Carry” gun legislation (SB 11) that went into effect in 2016. The project's transdisciplinary and multi-methodological approach – based on team fieldwork, personal interviews, focus groups, testimonials, visual materials, and a survey – is used to offer an example of phenomenon-based American studies research that is contextualized beyond disciplinary boundaries. Public debates, personal experiences, and cultural analysis demonstrate the de facto ramifications of gun legislation on people's lives. Considering viewpoints both for and against Campus Carry, the discussion reveals deep-seated beliefs about guns as an intrinsic part of “Americanness.”

When the Texas legislature in August 2016 allowed concealed handguns on campuses, the implementation of the legislation assumed a spatial meaning. At issue was not so much what the impact of firearms in educational establishments would be but where concealed guns could be carried and which specific locations were to be determined as exclusion zones. The decision-making process boiled down to a negotiation of rights by the federal government, state legislature, university, and members of the campus community. In particular, the question of gun rights was interpreted through notions of space, freedom, and privacy, as understood through amendments to the US Constitution.

This essay reflects on the use of competing rhetorical frames of fear strategically used by the academic community of The University of Texas at Austin in the debate on Campus Carry policy. With the legalization of concealed handguns on campus, fear emerged as a prominent trope in public discussions, albeit used in very different ways by supporters or opponents of the law. Against the more standard interpretation of fear-based rhetoric as an exploitation of others’ insecurities, this essay draws on mixed-methods research to examine expressions of fear by activist opponents of Campus Carry and the way in which supporters of the law sought to deconstruct it.

Undergraduates from three Texas universities were given free rein to draw and write about their experiences with the state's Campus Carry law. Through analyzing the personal stories, rationalizations, poems, and drawings the students produced, we offer insight into how they view the law and how it has impacted their sense of security. What emerges is a complex picture, revealing that students hold inconsistent – or even contradictory – beliefs in the dichotomy of being either for or against guns on campus. This essay complements existing research on the Campus Carry debate by uncovering the ambivalence that quantitative approaches alone may not capture.

This forum entry approaches the issue of Campus Carry from the viewpoint of emotion management with regard to active-shooter events. Self-defense has become the most prominent reason for owning and carrying a firearm in the Unites States in the same period that mass shootings have continued to increase. At the same time, active-shooter drills and rehearsals have become a generational experience for students. The essay examines social imaginaries by comparing concealed-carry imaginaries against those discernible in active-shooter-event instructional videos produced by the City of Houston, the Department of Homeland Security, and a number of universities. This places the Campus Carry issue in the larger context of a general securitized imaginary where, irrespective of the actual prevalence of violent crime, the campus is considered a place like any other, in the sense that violent things can happen to everyone, at any time, obliging individuals to defend themselves with firearms because the authorities are not there to immediately protect them.

As a publicly funded institution,The University of Texas at Austin had to implement the state's legislation to allow concealed handguns on campus. Yet its own Campus Carry policy has sought to erase the matter from everyday campus life. The administration deems it a “nonissue,” presuming that students have become accustomed to the idea, do not think about it actively, and have a low interest in acquiring a handgun license. This paper, based on a survey of the university's undergraduates, questions these ideas. It shows that a majority of students think that the issue is important and examines in what sense the students are troubled by its effects. While opinions differ between supporters and opponents of Campus Carry, divergences also exist within their ranks, such as among supporters of the law regarding where guns should specifically be allowed at the university. On the basis of the survey, the essay also examines how many licensed carriers are actually on campus, compared to the university's estimates.

In the 2010s, Hillary Clinton emerged as a central character not only in American political life but also in its imagined political scenarios. This article considers the centrality of Clinton as a model for women's legal and political empowerment in CBS drama The Good Wife (2009–16), arguing that the show's generic blend of the television procedural with melodrama and soap is key to both its normative portrayal of women in the corporate workplace and its positioning of Clinton as an aspirational figure for white liberal feminists. A similar tension is also central to Clinton's bid for the presidency in 2016, and this article dissects the ways in which Clinton's anticipated victory has provided a powerful but ultimately misleading “feminist” fantasy for many television shows of the last decade. A final section concludes this article with a brief analysis of The Good Wife's 2017 spin-off The Good Fight, to argue that this show pivots from a fantasy of women's empowerment to a much more interesting dystopic picture, tapping into the surrealism of the present moment to convey the difficulty of women's aspiration under a Trump administration in ways that more directly, if still imperfectly, tackle the failings of liberal feminism to account for racial and economic difference.

This article examines the politics of American “doomsday” prepping during Barack Obama's presidency. It challenges claims that growing interest in prepping post-2008 arose exclusively from extreme apocalyptic, white supremacist, and anti-government reactions to Obama's electoral successes – claims that suggest prepping to be politically congruent with previous waves of extreme right-wing American “survivalism.” Drawing on ethnography, this paper argues that, while fears of Obama have been central to many preppers’ activities, much of their prepping under his presidency centred on fears that sit outside survivalist politics. Building on this, the article illuminates connections between prepping and America's twenty-first-century electoral mainstream. Engaging with discussions about the “remaking” of American conservatism during Obama's presidency, it particularly frames prepping's growth as being engaged with, and shaped by, currents of mainstream anti-Obama fear that similarly undergirded the Tea Party's rise within popular Republicanism at this time.

In a world dizzyingly shifted on its axis since 9/11, nothing has aided understanding of the profound twenty-first-century geopolitical slippages more than the revelations from Julian Assange's WikiLeaks site and the actions of whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Much has been written about the pair but little has investigated their persona and pronouncements onscreen. This article sets out to compare and contrast Snowden's and Assange's real as well as fictional cinematic portrayals, therefore. We find that their screen image conforms to notions of star celebrity but at the same time also challenges surveillance activism itself, on film as well as within wider political frames of reference. The movies about them may have deliberately foregrounded reactions towards the politics of surveillance, but that agenda has been conditioned by responses not only towards Assange and Snowden but also to the filmmakers producing these texts. We give resonance, in other words, to a wider discourse that goes beyond the cinematic in contemporary surveillance culture. There is an interlocutory discourse at play that sees cinema as not just a disruptive presence, but now more than ever as an active participant in mapping out the terrain under investigation. The challenge this presence brings to activism, we conclude, affects film's capacity to expose and contest contemporary state surveillance.

This article examines how Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement with which he is often synonymous are taught in UK schools, as well as the consequences of that teaching for twenty-first-century understandings of Britain's racial past and present. The UK's King-centric approach to teaching the civil rights movement has much in common with that in the US, including an inattention to its transnational coordinates. However, these shared (mis)representations have different histories, are deployed to different ends, and have different consequences. In the UK, study of the African American freedom struggle often happens in the absence of, and almost as a surrogate for, engagement with the histories of Britain's own racial minorities and imperial past. In short, emphasis on the apparent singularity of US race relations and the achievements of the mid-twentieth-century African American freedom struggle facilitates cultural amnesia regarding the historic and continuing significance of race and racism in the UK. In light of the Windrush scandal and the damning 2018 Royal Historical Society report on “Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History,” this article argues both for better, more nuanced and more relevant teaching of King and the freedom struggle in British schools, and for much greater attention to black British history in its own right.

Exploring some of the key tenets of neoliberal American culture, this article examines the historical forces behind the meteoric rise of interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) children's books in the 1980s. Despite selling over 250 million copies worldwide and becoming the fourth most popular children's series of all time, the CYOA phenomenon has yet to be placed in its larger social, economic, historical or cultural context. When explaining the rise of interactive narratives, previous literature has mostly focussed on technological change – namely the invention of video games, computer consoles and hypertext narratives. Moving away from such claims, this article demonstrates how the incredible success of solely text-based CYOA books stemmed largely from the cultural ascent of individual market choice to the heart of American notions of agency, liberty, subjectivity and selfhood in the 1970s and 1980s.

While the abstract equality of citizens before the law is imagined as protection from arbitrary, subjective legal judgments of an individual's character, I argue that judgments of character play a pivotal yet unexamined role regulating access to citizenship in American law. Through a comparative analysis of President Trump and President Theodore Roosevelt, I show how their seemingly personal obsession with libel law reveals a deeper interest in consolidating the state's power as sole arbiter of character in order to weaponize the “good moral character” requirement in immigration and naturalization law as an instrument of racial and ethnic exclusion.

This essay explores the formative but largely unacknowledged role played by women in shaping the material and intellectual cultural productions of the mimeograph revolution in mid-century New York City. I argue that women poets used their positions as editors of little magazines to claim space – material, textual, cultural, and metaphorical – in literary and social networks in which they faced gendered marginalization. I suggest that the varied success with which they were able to do so reveals the complexities of editing, the uneven nature of the influences of gender, the determining role of domestic spaces, and the significance of affective labor in relation to the mimeograph revolution.

Tim Groenland's The Art of Editing is an exciting new addition to the field of literary sociology, making a valuable contribution to a discipline which has seen a resurgence since the turn of the millennium. In his seminal early work in the field, John Sutherland traces the origins of this kind of publishing history to Robert Escarpit's Sociology of Literature (1958), which he describes as the beginning of “modern, serious work” in considering the effects of the literary marketplace on the fiction of a particular era. However, it is the first two decades of the twenty-first century that have seen the most significant growth in sociological studies of literary production, a trend that Alan Liu calls “the resurgent history of the book.” This is a “resurgence” that Liu argues has resulted in “restoring to view … vital nodes in the circuit” of literary production, including “editors, publishers, translators, booksellers,” and many others. This recent growth in scholarly interest in the production and circulation of literary texts includes other significant figures such as James F. English, Mark McGurl, John B. Thompson, Loren Glass, Paul Crosthwaite, and David D. Hall.