This article examines the social and political impacts of President Nayib Bukele’s 2023 opening of a megaprison in El Salvador by analyzing his government-funded international public relations campaign. We chronicle how the design of the prison, along with policies for arresting, detaining, and prosecuting Salvadorans for alleged gang-related crimes, offers a mirage of transparency that obstructs the visibility needed to protect the human rights of Salvadorans. Our analysis places empirical accounts of conditions in El Salvador in conversation with the largely Twitter/X-based public relations campaign announcing the new prison. We show how the campaign works to justify an alarming degradation of democratic principles and practices during the current régimen de excepción (state of exception). Bukele rationalizes an iron-fist-style approach to gang violence while simultaneously silencing political opposition and obfuscating the expanding scope of state human rights violations. We argue that the trade-offs being made in El Salvador between increased safety for some and human rights violations for others ultimately contribute to the corrosion of democracy. Moreover, we discuss how Bukele’s tough-on-crime populism simultaneously produces and exports an “authoritarian playbook” for wider regional democratic erosion in line with Bukele’s model.

This article focuses on how the Mexican state remains unable to protect certain categories of people based on particular identity characteristics. I draw on examples of gang-related corruption within the police and the judiciary, as well as the impact of cultures of violence and impunity on vulnerable categories of citizens, especially women and girls. I also explain some of what expert witnesses can contribute to United States immigration courts. Based on my longitudinal scholarly research on violence in Mexico, combined with experience as an expert witness in U.S. asylum cases for claimants from Mexico, I argue that Mexico’s inability to protect women and girls coexists with its democratic status and has direct implications on forced migration from Mexico to the United States. In addition, I exposit that expert witnesses play a significant role in illuminating gaps between legal protections and their application in practice.

Both the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 29) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 26) articulate education for self-actualisation as a shared goal for humanity. But states regularly prioritise some kinds of education over others, in line with nation-making and other competing goals. What is the impact of access to Indigenous language in public schools when assimilationist norms are intentionally resisted? This article addresses the question of how language access impacts youth identity formation for heritage‐speaking students and for students from non‐heritage speaking backgrounds. Drawing on the quantitative survey data from mixed methods research with students, teachers, and administrators, this article describes the significance of including minority languages in two far Northern California high schools, and in two high schools and one university in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Identity politics are fraught. High school is a prime location where such politics play out and interface with state-dictated norms and values about acceptable social behavior. This article examines identity politics during the Trump era in two far Northern California high schools to better understand the impact on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students. I argue that while the Trump effect allowed hostility towards BIPOC people to be expressed more openly in general, schools can also be sites of resistance to culturecide--the killing of culture--that diminishes the role of minority ontologies and epistemologies in the formation of young people. Yurok and Spanish language courses serve as spaces of heritage language revitalization that challenge White supremacist ideologies embedded in curricula as well as wider US culture.

Methodology as a Framework for Research with Indigenous Peoples

This paper examines the current democratic breakdown in El Salvador, identifying factors and events in the country from 2019 to 2022 that have led to democratic backsliding, the process by which democracy as a political system loses traction. Indicators of backsliding show that El Salvador’s shared characteristics of liberal democracy — free and fair electoral procedures accessible to all; freedoms of the press, to assembly, and to express political opinions; the rule of law; and basic human rights protections — are in peril. Given the events of the last several years under President Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s regime more closely resembles democratic failure facilitated by populist authoritarianism rather than one of democratizing momentum that it embodied in the first part of the twenty-first century.

This article examines two case studies of unsettling settler colonialism in the far north of California: the inclusion of Yurok language electives in public high schools, and land return to the Wiyot Tribe. These two cases demonstrate repertoires of Indigenous resistance to historic and ongoing culturecide—the killing of culture—and show what unsettling settler colonialism looks like in the region.The central research question in this article is: How does unsettling happen in settler colonial-controlled public institutionalised spaces in far northern California? I argue that acts of Indigenous voice-raising and place-making constitute forms of resistance to ongoing erasure of Indigenous peoples in settler-colonised spaces. Concretely, both Yurok language course inclusion in public schools and land return of Duluwat Island to the Wiyot Tribe disrupt patterns of culturecide and promote new kinds of settler-Indigenous relations in the region.

This article addresses researcher positionality when working with vulnerable communities.

Access to higher education, and success once there, depends on many variables. In this article, I unpack the major obstacles low income and indigenous high school and college students perceive that they face in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico. In combination with a structural analysis of the context of Oaxaca based in comparative historical literature, I use political ethnography and qualitative interviews to situate testimonies from recent high school and college graduates about their schooling experiences and obstacles they face in the quest for academic and professional success. I document the matrix of obstacles students name in their educational pathways, including financial resources, mental health, motivation, Oaxacan political instability, physical insecurity, hostile school climates, and discrimination against indigenous people. I draw on the case study of a non-governmental academic support organization, the Institute for Community Integration and Counseling (IIAC), based in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico.

This article addresses the question, how does Sierra Leone's language regime, moderated through formal and informal education, contribute to postwar globalization dynamics? Since Sierra Leonean independence from Britain in 1961, Krio, a type of Creole, has gone from being the mother tongue of a small ethnic minority to the lingua franca, particularly in Freetown, the state capital. English has been Sierra Leone's elite language since colonial times and remains the only official language of government. Yet many other languages are spoken in Sierra Leone in different communities and contexts. Drawing on interviews and political ethnographic work in Freetown and the districts, the study argues that language and identity shift connected to postwar globalization reflects tensions between upward socioeconomic mobility and cultural survival.

This article critically examines bilingual, intercultural education policies and practices in El Salvador and Mexico. In the context of legacies of assimilation and neoliberal homogenization, certain kinds of citizenship become prioritized over others. This is visible where performances of local identity clash with state mandates about educational content and the language of school instruction. I address the effects of state agendas in schools on the politics of multiculturalism and argue that the absence of state commitment to bilingual, intercultural education undermines democratization efforts by marginalizing certain types of citizens more than others. By considering ethnic minority education in both El Salvador and Mexico, I analyze in a comparative perspective the ways that indigenous people have been rendered invisible as citizens unless they are willing to assimilate in the arena of formal education.

El Salvador and Guatemala underwent civil wars that severely impacted both countries’ most marginalized citizens, including indigenous peoples. Today, teaching and learning the violent past remain challenged in each country, with implications for indigenous and non-indigenous citizens alike. This article examines the impact of democratization in El Salvador and Guatemala in the educational sphere, documenting narrative trends on the topic of the civil wars and indigeneity in formal and informal education settings. We argue that distinct democratization and transitional justice processes have created opportunities and challenges for teaching and learning about indigenous peoples’ roles and experiences in the civil wars in each country. Methodologically, the article draws on analyses of educational policy and formal curriculum in both contexts, supplemented by ethnographic data. We situate the study within democratization, transitional justice, and education literatures to document how teaching and learning the violent past is a highly politicized act with long-term implications for democratic quality in each country.

This article addresses the divergent cultures of silence and memorialisation about the civil wars in Sierra Leone and El Salvador, and examines the role that sites of remembering and forgetting play in crafting post-war citizens. In the formal education sector the ministries of education in each country have taken different approaches to teaching the history of the war, with Sierra Leone emphasising forgetting and El Salvador geared towards remembering war history. In both countries nongovernmental actors, particularly peace museums, are filling the memory gap. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in each country, the article documents how the culture of silence that pervades Sierra Leone enables a progress-driven ‘looking forward’ without teaching the past, while El Salvador is working on weaving a culture of memorialisation into its democratisation process. The article argues that knowledge about civil war history can raise young people’s awareness of the consequences of violence and promote civic engagement in its deterrence.

In this article I ask the question: how do citizens use memories of violence in dialogue with a democratizing Turkish state? To address this, I unpack how memories of violence influence solidarity communities in addition to those who are direct descendents of survivors. I also examine how these solidarity communities are widening political space for contemporary dialogue about the Armenian Catastrophe. To demonstrate the connection between memory and political participation, I identify three discursive moments where Turkish and Armenian citizens invoke memory in dialogue with one other and with the state. I use the 2009 online campaign for a Turkish apology to address the Armenian Catastrophe, the aftermath of the murder of Hrant Dink in 2007, and a controversial 2005 academic conference on the events of 1915 as focal points to discuss how memory impacts the way people behave as citizens. My argument is twofold: first, elite-led solidarity networks play an integral role in shaping the discursive space between citizens, the state, and the international community; and second, dialogue about memory can grow space for citizen participation in Turkey.

Forthcoming

Countries around the world have disparate experiences with education in prison. For decades, the United States has been locked in a pattern of exceptionally high mass incarceration. Though education has proven to be an impactful intervention, its role and the level of support it receives vary widely. As a result, effective opportunities for incarcerated people to reroute their lives during and after incarceration remain diffuse and inefficient. This volume highlights unique contributions from the field of education in prison globally. In this volume academics and practitioners highlight new approaches and interesting findings from carceral interventions across twelve countries. From a college degree granting program in Mexico to educational best practices in Norway and Belgium that support successful reentry, innovations in education are being developed in prison spaces around the world. As contributors from many countries share their insights about providing effective educational programs to incarcerated people, the United States can learn from the models and struggles beyond its borders.

This open access book investigates how representation of Native Americans and Mexican-origin im/migrants takes place in high school history textbooks. Manually analyzing text and images in United States textbooks from the 1950s to 2022, the book documents stories of White victory and domination over Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) groups that disproportionately fill educational curricula. While representation and accurate information of non-White perspectives improves over time, the same limited tropes tend to be recycled from one textbook to the next. Textual analysis is augmented by focus groups and interviews with BIPOC students in California high schools. Together, the data show how misrepresentation and absence of BIPOC perspectives in textbooks impact youth identity. This book argues for an innovative rethinking of US history curricula to consider which stories are told, and which perspectives are represented.

Public school classrooms around the world have the power to shape and transform youth culture and identity. In this book, Mneesha Gellman examines how Indigenous high school students resist assimilation and assert their identities through access to Indigenous language classes in public schools. Drawing on ethnographic accounts, qualitative interviews, focus groups, and surveys, Gellman’s fieldwork examines and compares the experiences of students in Yurok language courses in Northern California and Zapotec courses in Oaxaca, Mexico. She contends that this access to Indigenous language instruction in secondary schooling serves as an arena for Indigenous students to develop their sense of identity and agency, and provides them tools and strategies for civic, social, and political participation, sometimes in unexpected ways. Showcasing young people’s voices, and those of their teachers and community members, in the fight for culturally relevant curricula and educational success, Gellman demonstrates how the Indigenous language classroom enables students to understand, articulate, and resist the systemic erasure and destruction of their culture embedded in state agendas and educational curricula. Access to Indigenous language education, she shows, has positive effects not only for Indigenous students, but for their non-Indigenous peers as well, enabling them to become allies in the struggle for Indigenous cultural survival. Through collaborative methodology that engages in research with, not on, Indigenous communities, Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom explores what it means to be young, Indigenous, and working for social change in the twenty-first century.

This book seeks to address some of the major issues faced by faculty and administrators who provide college classes for incarcerated students. Composed of a series of case studies and essays which showcase the strengths and challenges of teaching a range of different disciplines in prison, this volume brings together scholars who articulate some of the best practices for teaching their expertise inside alongside honest reflections on the reality of educational implementation in a constrained environment. The book not only provides essential guidance for faculty interested in developing their own courses to teach in prisons, but also places the work of higher education in prisons in philosophical context with regards to racial, economic, social, and gender-based issues. Rather than solely a how-to handbook, this volume also helps readers think through the trade-offs that happen when teaching in prison, and about how to ensure the full integrity of college access for incarcerated students.

Ethnic minority communities make claims for cultural rights from states in different ways depending on how governments include them in policies and practices of accommodation or assimilation. However, institutional explanations don’t tell the whole story, as individuals and communities also protest, using emotionally compelling narratives about past wrongs to justify their claims for new rights protections. Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic minority rights movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador examines how ethnic minority communities use memories of state and paramilitary violence to shame states into cooperating with minority cultural agendas such as the right to mother tongue education. Shaming and claiming is a social movement tactic that binds historic violence to contemporary citizenship. Combining theory with empirics, the book accounts for how democratization shapes citizen experiences of interest representation and how memorialization processes challenge state regimes of forgetting at local, state, and international levels. Democratization and Memories of Violence draws on six case studies in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador to show how memory-based narratives serve as emotionally salient leverage for marginalized communities to facilitate state consideration of minority rights agendas.

This open-access book offers a critical appraisal, at the cross-section of theory and practice, of concepts of integration at work in education in diverse geopolitical settings.With chapters written by experts based in Cyprus, Ethiopia, Germany, Mexico, Pakistan, the UK and the USA, the book includes discussion of regions of conflict, post-conflict and also non-conflict societies in which a cultural hegemony has developed strategies to “integrate” groups perceived as “other”. The book challenges the idea of “integration” in education considering how it relates to inclusion and exclusion and considers the extent to which integration can be empirically studied or evaluated. By accommodating a diversity of voices and perspectives, the structure of this book critically questions the underlying hegemonic Global North-shaped assumptions that have informed the integration debate.

Gellman, Mneesha. (2024). “Considering Collaboration as Part of Your Research Design.” In Sara Wallace Goodman & Jennifer Cyr (Eds.), Doing Good Qualitative Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gellman, Mneesha, Matthew C. Ingram, Diana Kapiszewski, and Sebastian Karcher. (2022). “Balancing Expectations for Research Transparency: Institutional Review Boards, Funders, and Journals.” In Kevin G. Lorentz II, Daniel J. Mallinson, Julia Marin Hellwege, Davin Phoenix, J. Cherie Strachan (Eds.), Strategies for Navigating Graduate School and Beyond. American Political Science Association, 110-117.

This chapter presents the educational intervention of the Emerson Prison Initiative, which offers a pathway to a Bachelor of Arts in Media, Literature, and Culture to incarcerated students at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord. A program of Emerson College, the Emerson Prison Initiative serves Emerson's mission to increase educational access for historically marginalized students, including those in prison, and maintains rigorous standards for academic excellence for students and faculty comparable to those at Emerson's Boston-based campus. The Emerson Prison Initiative is rooted in the notion that access to a college education can help transform how people engage in the world.

First, I assess the relationship between citizen formation and processes of remembering and forgetting theoretically, looking toCharles Tilly’s notion of effective citizenship as an important part of the social contract between citizens and states. Second, I consider institutional means of remembering the violent past in Sierra Leone in both formal and informal education sectors. Third, I consider the obstacles to employees of the Ministry ofEducation, Science and Technology (MEST) teaching about the civil war in primary and secondary school classrooms, and discuss why formal sector education is so important in crafting national-level identity and discourse. I conclude by arguing that violence is more likely to reoccur within cultures of silence, and thus reassert the necessity of developing tools to discuss and learn from past violence.

Este artículo aborda las formas de participación de las mujeres en El Salvador en procesos de reivindicación con el Estado y cómo sus experiencias de violencia han informado las mismas. Utilizo una serie de viñetas basadas en mi trabajo de campo y literatura de testimonios para ejemplificar las razones por las cuales las excombatientes escogen diferentes posibilidades de reivindicación tanto durante la guerra civil como después. Al enfocarme en las mujeres que fueron activas durante la guerra y por tanto, estuvieron expuestas a la violencia perpetuada por el Estado (y que continuaron sus luchas después de los Acuerdos de Paz), sitúo la forma a partir de la cual la violencia facilitó una renegociación de demandas entre los y las ciudadanas y el Estado.

The book focuses on Canada as a case study to show how Yiddish has been renewed through family transmission, theatre, publishing, singing, new media, and digital platforms.

This book critically examines the relationship between protecting human rights and building peace in post-violence societies. It explores the conditions that must be present, and strategies that should be adopted, for the former to contribute to the latter.

Author presents critiques of the book, Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Rights Movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador.

The book examines how various nations have confronted legacies of repression during transitions to democracy, looking at official policies like truth commissions, trials, and purges, as well as unofficial initiatives from human rights organizations and other groups.

Becoming Black Political Subjects offers important insights into the changing landscape of race and Latin American politics and provokes readers to adopt a more transnational and flexible understanding of social movements.

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has offered to house “dangerous American criminals” sent from the United States to be incarcerated in El Salvador, for a fee. On March 15th 2025, President Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in removing people from the U.S. to El Salvador’s prisons. The wartime act has been invoked only three times, including to justify Japanese internment during World War II. Despite a judge’s order temporarily blocking the move, the first planeload of people was sent to El Salvador on March 16, 2025, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia. President Trump encouraged Bukele to build more prisons in an April 14th White House meeting. As this policy brief explains, El Salvador’s prison system is characterized by widespread human rights abuses. As both Bukele and Trump attempt to further their political and policy agendas, their joining forces has major implications for democratic backsliding and human rights erosion in both countries – with acute negative consequences for immigrant well-being.

opinion piece on how the state department has distorted the human rights records of El Salvador's government.

In Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, Donald Trump sees a far-right authoritarian who has something he doesn’t: an actual popular mandate.

Insight into the conditions that US deportees face being sent to El Salvador.

President Nayib Bukele's slide toward authoritarianism has culminated in an unconstitutional reelection bid. His consolidation of power has cracked down on independent press.

Consequences of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele being reelected

Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele will extend the state of exception that has earned the country the world’s highest incarceration rate. Gang violence has been traded for arbitrary arrest and detention — with working-class people bearing the brunt.

Article about who is actually safe under the State of Exception

Background about prison-run education programs

Explores the landscape of educational opportunities in Massachusetts prisons. The report finds that despite evidence that educational opportunities improve racial equity and reduce recidivism, Massachusetts program face systemic challenges that have prevented program expansion.

Article about how indigenous languages are being brought to public schools and learning these languages can be a sign of resistance.

Our goals as coeditors of this symposium are to provide a forum for discussion about the benefits and challenges of CM for political science researchers as well as for those we study, and to mitigate some of the shortcomings of both qualitative and quantitative political science data-collection methods. We explore the different approaches for collaborating with communities of interest and the challenges involved for political scientists. Our intention is to work toward closing the gap on methodological rigor in political science as well as concurrently decolonizing the discipline.