Teaching precarity: pedagogy, politics, and abortion post Dobbs

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hamline University (MN) terminated adjunct professor Prater’s employment after a student complained that the professor showed a fourteenth-century painting of the Prophet Muhammad in their class on Islamic art. Prater’s syllabus noted that images of religious figures would be shown and that, if students were not comfortable viewing such images, the professor would accommodate them.

2 Rhetoricians use < > to demarcate when they are referring to a word in its ideographic form, distinct from its ordinary usage. McGee (1980) defined ideograph as

an ordinary language term found in political discourse. It is a high-order abstraction representing collective commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal. It warrants the use of power, excuses behavior and belief which might otherwise be perceived as eccentric or antisocial, and guides behavior and belief into channels easily recognized by a community as acceptable or laudable. (p. 15)

The centrality of ideographs to the abortion controversy is detailed in Condit (1990) and de Onís (2015).