8| Juniata Voices From Demonstration to Riot-ization: Social Control in the Era of Trump Michael Loadenthal International Day of Peace, September 21, 2017 1 Michael Loadenthal is Visiting Professor of Sociology and Social Justice Studies at Miami University of Oxford, Ohio, and the Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association hat follows is a broad political analysis outlining the ways in which political repression has evolved and changed over the past several decades. I want to culminate with the January 20, 2017 Counter-Inaugural Day case, but I do not want that to be the focus here. Rather, it serves as a poignant example. I want to provide an overview focused on social control, as understood through the work of French theorist Michel Foucault, and analyze how these methods of control relate to social movement organizing in the contemporary period. To be clear, this talk is not focused around Donald Trump, though I think a lot of this is exaggerated in the past year, in the time around the end of the Obama Presidency and the beginning of the Trump Presidency. In my wider work, I look at how counterterrorism, and specifically counterterrorism rhetoric, is used to criminalize certain social movements and manners of dissent. My research focuses on how the rhetoric of terrorism is applied unevenly from the left to the right, and within jihadist and nationalist movements. What I am examining here is something I noticed occurring within the past year, namely, the way the rhetoric of “riot” and “rioters” has been used discursively to criminalize certain aspects of protest. I want to borrow from Foucault the notion of a genealogical account—an evolutionary account—for examining this sort of protest. I want you to know that I am not a trained sociologist. My postsecondary degrees are in Terrorism Studies and Conflict Analysis respectively. I have worked for the past three years teaching in sociology departments, and in doing so, I have managed to bring myself up to speed. I say that to note that in my self-training, I came across the inspiring work of the American sociologist C. Wright Mills. It’s worth noting that in the context of dissent, Mills himself was once a target of FBI defamation and disinformation, but that story is for another day. In his discussion of his approach and the so-called “sociological imagination,” Mills argued that the purpose of understanding the social world, the purpose of sociology, is to change society for the better. I think that is an important aspect to begin with. There is a recurrent notion amongst the social sciences of a desire to maintain objectivity, though folks such as W