Amid the annual deluge of end-of-year lists, I started to think about what readings generated the best classroom discussions I have overseen in the past calendar year. That list of readings is below, but I first need to provide some context.

I teach seven courses per year—three each in Wartburg’s Fall and Winter Terms and one in our May Term. These include courses in Security Studies and American Politics as well as general education seminars (of which I occasionally teach two sections per term).

My classes are relatively small—usually 10 to 15 students in Political Science classes and up to 25 in general education classes—and they are largely discussion-based. These discussions tend to focus on an assigned reading, which is usually either a primary source or an academic reading such as a journal article or a book chapter.

In the past calendar year, I have taught six distinct courses—Introduction to American Politics, State and Local Politics, Intelligence, Disinformation, and Deception (the title of which comes from a similar course once offered by Jon Lindsay and Janice Stein at Toronto), Native American History and Politics, and our first- and second-year general education seminars.

The first-year seminar (a new version of which was introduced this fall as part of a new general education curriculum) is meant to introduce students to Wartburg and higher education more broadly, and instructors choose the topic through which they do so. I plan to change my topic every time I teach it to keep things fresh for me and the students alike, but my topic this year was “The Politics of Taylor Swift,” in which I used Swift’s music to introduce students to the various political issues represented in popular music and to scholarly ways of analyzing those issues.

The second-year seminar (which is still being taught under our old general education curriculum and will be modified next academic year) is meant to address the theme of “living in a diverse world,” but as with the first-year seminar, instructors choose the topic through which they do that. My version of the course, “On Video Games,” does so through a focus on issues of representation, varying player experiences, and the political arguments games make.

All that said, here is my very subjective list of readings that generated the best classroom discussions of the past year:

Introduction to American Politics: Matthew J. Lacombe, “The Political Weaponization of Gun Owners: The National Rifle Association’s Cultivation, Dissemination, and Use of a Group Social Identity” (2019).

A good reading on a hot-button issue can often generate productive classroom discussion, and Lacombe’s work certainly did that in my Introduction to American Politics class. I taught this reading toward the end of the term to get at the process by which any given issue becomes an issue in the first place, and Lacombe deftly traces that proces through an examination of how the National Rifle Association (NRA) cultivated and politicized a distinct social identity for gun owners. The granularity of Lacombe’s study of NRA publications—primarily their editorials and letters to the editor—offers students much to think through, and his argument provokes fruitful questions about how politics in this domain (or in any other) might change in the future.

State and Local Politics: Daniel J. Mallinson and A. Lee Hannah, Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States (2024).

If there is one thing I have learned by teaching State and Local Politics, it is that college students have opinions about marijuana legalization. Mallinson and Hannah’s work on the subject—which I have previously taught via an article of theirs and which I taught via Chapter 2 of their book this year—makes important claims about the “diffusion” of state policy and the declining costs of defying the federal government in this domain. For my students, most of whom are from Iowa or elsewhere in the Midwest, it prompts questions and provides some answers as to why their home state differs from others on this issue.

Intelligence, Disinformation, Deception: Austin Carson, “Facing Off and Saving Face: Covert Intervention and Escalation Management in the Korean War” (2016).

Carson examines covert Soviet intervention in the Korean War and, more importantly for this piece, the U.S.willingness to go along with that—to not publicize Soviet intervention despite knowledge of it—to avoid more dramatic escalation. The case study of “tacitly cooperative adversaries” generates valuable discussion on secrecy in world politics and on comparison to other cases in which adversaries have worked to limit escalation. Carson situates his argument, moreover, in Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory (here the “actors” manage escalation “backstage”), which prompted conversation about how, why, and to what effect Political Science borrows from other disciplines.

Native American History and Politics: Ryan Hall, “Patterns of Plunder: Corruption and the Failure of the Indian Reservation System, 1851-1887” (2024).

Many students will come into a class such as this with some sense that Native American groups have been mistreated by the U.S. government, but Hall’s work helps to make clear exactly how negligent and actively harmful the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and its agents were amid the creation and maintenance of the reservation system. My students found much to discuss in the brash examples of “plunder” Hall catalogues but also in the argument Hall makes—that the resulting economic stagnation on reservations was taken as evidence that tribes could not properly manage their own communities, which legitimized further state intervention to the detriment of tribes.

On Video Games: Amanda Phillips, “Shooting to Kill: Headshots, Twitch Reflexes, and the Mechropolitics of Video Games” (2018).

Arguments to the effect that video games cause violence have often been overstated. Phillips offers an interesting intervention in this debate—while video games might not cause violence in any straightforward way, they might affect the ways people enact violence. More specifically, perhaps the common shooter game’s incentive to aim for an enemy’s head would lead those raised on such games to aim for real-world heads when they might not otherwise do so. Even before the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump, the article’s engagement with a low-budget game, JFK Reloaded, in which players are asked to reenact the assassination of John F. Kennedy, prompted plenty of discussion about whether there is potential harm in publishing such a game and in the broader gamic tendency to valorize the headshot. The article’s concern with police shootings adds an additional layer of complexity that I found productive to work through with students.

The Politics of Taylor Swift: Annelot Prins, “From Awkward Teen Girl to Aryan Goddess Meme: Taylor Swift and the Hijacking of Star Texts” (2020).

Prins writes about an odd phenomenon—the creation of white supremacist memes juxtaposing images of Taylor Swift and words attributed to Adolf Hitler (or vice versa). These memes position Swift as an “Aryan Goddess,” the ideal white woman who at least some white supremacists also seemingly believed to be on their side (in the years before Swift became more politically outspoken). The piece raises questions not just about the nature of white supremacy but also about how people interpret texts; where, my classes discussed, could one possibly read white supremacy into Taylor Swift’s music or public persona? This also generated conversation about what one is to do when one’s words—e.g., in a song, in a journal article, or perhaps on social media—are interpreted in ways that one finds to be mistaken or disagreeable.