EDMUND FONG portrait
  • Associate Professor, Ethnic Studies
  • Chair, Ethnic Studies
  • Associate Professor, Political Science Department
  • Assistant Professor, Political Science Department
801-581-5206

Teaching Philosophy

I began teaching at the University of Utah in the Fall of 2008, during what would become the historic election of Barack Obama. Over the last six years, I have been teaching in the era of Trumpian populism. I start with this because as a scholar of U.S. racial politics, my courses on this topic have been inescapably shaped by the turbulence of the outside world as an absent presence in the classroom. My students rightly come with a sense of urgency and passion, whatever their political beliefs. My time here teaching has also been in the shadow of spectacles of racial violence, from the emergence of cell phone videos of lethal police abuse to the proliferating events of racially motivated mass shootings. This too leaves our students on fire, churning out deep fears about their place and the future they will inherit. Yet as rightfully engaged as they are, this inescapable presentism can also be suffocating, exhausting the oxygen for critical reflection–not a hoary objectivity, mind–but what Paul Ricoeur calls distanciation, a kind of distance from oneself that enables re-engagement in dialectically new and insightful ways. This tension between speaking to and harnessing the assumptions of my students and a world that pushes into the class while nurturing a space of distance and free association remains a perpetual challenge guiding the pedagogy of my courses.

 

History offers speed bumps. For this reason, my courses all try to fold in a deep engagement with past historical contexts but in uncanny ways. While my most frequently taught course, POLS 3190 Racial/Ethnic Politics in the U.S., is presented as a rather mundane historical survey, its readings are chosen to frustrate the expected teleological narratives students typically assume. Hence, we examine the growing opposition to Slavery leading into the Civil War rooted in the changing nature of labor under capitalism, we examine the rise of the Jim Crow era as intermingled with the attempt to defuse the Agrarian revolt and suppress political insurgency in the South, and we likewise examine the Cold War origins of the Civil Rights era. The idea is to save what is familiar to them last, at the end, so that they can be alive to wayward notes and less visible connections in the present, to re-engage with their assumptions of racial politics with hopefully new insights and contingent futures. This is also true of my last taught Ethnic Studies course, ETHNC 3420 American Racism, which directly ramps up and foregrounds the associations between lynching in the past and racial violence today, but in reality turns that on its head by having students engage with the specular and technological dimensions of lynching–the rise of hand-held polaroid cameras and postcards–in order to think deeply and ethically about our own specular investments in racial violence in our social media age today. Even in my courses not focused on racial politics, I attempt to fold historical treatments that can estrange our assumptions. So in my POLS 1100 Introduction to U.S. Government, I highlight the formation of mass political parties in the Jacksonian era, the strange and different expectations of Presidents in the 19th century, the revolution in constitutional jurisprudence with the 14th Amendment. Even in my POLS 6003 The Study of Politics course, I attempted to engage students in a self-reflexive meditation on how power and ideology have inevitably shaped the history of the discipline by having them read early formative debates around the philosophy of Social Science or in the ascendance of behavioralism and its discontents.

 

The results have not always been up to my satisfaction. It is challenging to engage students who naturally want to debate Obama or Trump, or understandably desire we should be reading more authors of color, or who want to get on with their graduate research projects. Reading dense and complex works from eras long gone seem to pull them away from what is most pressing and I take this with tender sensitivity. In addition, I have not always been able to provide the level of individualized attention that students deserve, especially as my class sizes have expanded over the years and I stepped into my role as Chair of Ethnic Studies over the past five years. Nevertheless, in class and out, I always approach my students with deeply felt humility and generosity.

 

Fortunately, I have been rewarded over the years with robust and rich experiences working with students on their independent studies, Honors Theses, and capstone projects. I almost never turn down a student who has sought me out and routinely I have been blessed to participate in many student projects over the past decade. These are a real highlight for me; they have been award-winning students previously in my courses, students who reach out to me years after they graduate, sometimes simply reaching out because they have a burning interest in a particular topic and a long-lasting relationship develops. I have put together a select compilation of student email correspondences in recent years to share some of these treasured relationships. They showcase a Harvard Law grad who now teaches there and runs her own consulting business, a former student who reached out to me from Kenya years later who now teaches there using some of my assigned readings, a former U alum from decades ago who cold contacted me because he was getting into arguments with his Seattle District Attorney son in the wake of the George Floyd killing in the summer of 2020, a high school student who emailed me wanting guidance on a research project and is now a U student taking my classes this year, a former student who contacted me just a few days ago, now a graduate student at George Mason University, who wanted to track down an impactful article I had assigned from two years ago–these and many more sustain a humble belief that I have been able to be a part of the lives of some of my students as they journey on their own paths of self-discovery and achievement.

Courses I Teach

  • Pols 3190 - Racial/Ethnic Politics in the U.S.
    An historical survey of racial politics from the colonial era to the present. This course delves deeply into the often surprising contexts and consequences of racial politics iin the U.S. while deeply grappling with the "rhyming" continuities of racial politics.
  • Pols 5810 - Social Policy & Race
    The course serves as a capstone course for undergraduate majors and engages students in developing their own independent research project on the intersection between contemporary social policy and issues of race and racism.

Professional Organizations

  • Association for Political Theory. 01/01/2003 - 12/01/2005. Position : Member.
  • American Political Science Association. 01/01/1998 - present. Position : Member.
  • Western Political Science Association. 01/01/1998 - present. Position : Member.
  • Association for Asian American Studies. 01/01/1998 - present. Position : Member.

Student Projects

  • Honor's Thesis. Savannah Williams. 01/2017 - 05/2017
  • Honor's Thesis. Nominated for Undergraduate Research Award. Charles Joseph Koronkowski. 01/2016 - 05/2016
  • Directed Reading. Contemporary Political Theory and Race. Graham Slater. 01/2015 - 05/2015
  • Independent Study: African American Disenfranchisement and the Prison Industrial Complex. Rondell Nelson. 08/2012 - 12/2012
  • McNair Mentorship. Thesis awarded the Monson Essay Prize. Esther Kim. 06/2011 - 09/2011
  • Independent Study. A directed reading and research project on Asian American masculinity and racial/ gender politics with Esther Kim. Esther Kim. 08/24/2010 - 12/08/2010
  • Independent Study A directed reading on contemporary Asian American Politics. Peng Se Lim. 01/11/2010 - 04/28/2010
  • Independent Study A directed reading on immigration and contemporary Asian American identity. Kijoung Na. 01/11/2010 - 04/28/2010
  • Independent Study A directed reading on Asian Americans and the Model Minority Myth. Irene Ota. 01/11/2010 - 04/28/2010
  • Independent Study A close reading of Karl Marx's Capital. Greg Bourassa, Engin Antasy. 01/11/2010 - 04/28/2010

Teaching Projects

  • Introduction to Abolition Studies Course Planning Committee. Project Lead: Erin Castro. 01/11/2021 - present.
  • POLS/ECON 2500 The United States of Inequality Planning Committee, 2020-21. Project Lead: Juliet Carlisle. 01/06/2020 - present.
  • GLAD Grant: Race and Ethnicity in Global Contexts. Project Lead: Lourdes Alberto. Collaborators: Edmund Fong, Elizabeth Archuleta. Office of Global Engagement 07/01/2017 - 06/30/2019. Total Budget: $10,000.00.

Current Students

  • Lani Moon, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Jacob Crown, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Irene Ota, Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Irene Ota, Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Lani Moon, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Jacob Crown, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.

Former Students

  • Liliana Castrellon, Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Liliana Castrellon, Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Graham Slater, Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Graham Slater, Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Serhun Al, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Serhun Al, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Jacob Crown, Master of Science (M.S.), Project Type: Thesis. Role: Member.
  • Engin Antasay, Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Jacob Crown, Master of Science (M.S.), Project Type: Thesis. Role: Member.
  • Engin Antasay, Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), Project Type: Dissertation. Role: Member.
  • Kijoung Na, Master of Arts (M.A.), Project Type: Thesis. Role: Member.
  • Kijoung Na, Master of Arts (M.A.), Project Type: Thesis. Role: Member.
  • TARA MORGAN MAHEALANI, Master of Science (M.S.), Project Type: Thesis. Role: Member.
  • TARA MORGAN MAHEALANI, Master of Science (M.S.), Project Type: Thesis. Role: Member.