Read "The New Age of Eliminationism in America: A  Conversation with David Neiwert and Barry Mauer in Orlando, Florida, April 19, 2017" here . On April 18, 2017, David Neiwert presented a talk to the University of Central Florida titled “The New Age of Eliminationism in America: How the Internet Feeds Radicalization and Dehumanization.” The next day, he sat down for a discussion with Dr. Barry Mauer, Interim Director of the Texts and Technology Doctoral Program and a co-director of the Citizen Curator Project, which is sponsoring exhibitions about Eliminationism and resilience on the anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub shooting. Neiwert summarized his April 18th talk as follows: The politics of elimination — embodied in nativism, white supremacism, and similar authoritarian ideologies -have long been part of the American political fabric, but in recent years have come bubbling forward in the wave of hate-crime incidents associated with the 2016 election, as well as m...

For more about the project, read "The Citizen Curating Project Confronts The Pulse Nightclub Shooting"  here The Citizen Curator Project, established in 2014 in Orlando, encourages ordinary citizens to try curating for themselves and to approach the task as a form of public policy consultation. Curating as activism requires that we assume the identity of uninvited consultants who have witnessed catastrophe, deliberated about it, and wish to share our epiphanies and policy recommendations with policy makers and other members of society. Because curating has been crucial to ideas of community in the modern era—for example, museums arose with nations and reflected national priorities—we want citizens to think of curating as another means of building and shaping community, a means of increasing their own agency within a more democratic and participatory process. The Citizen Curator Project invites participants from the area to create a series of exhibitions on various themes. I...

On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53 at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida. We may never know or understand what was in Mateen’s mind, but we can situate his attack within the history of eliminationism in America.   Islamist terrorism is just part of a larger phenomenon: right wing eliminationism. But despite centuries of right wing eliminationist words and deeds in the U.S., there is little or no mainstream recognition of the phenomenon. Instead, we are treated to more denial, more distraction, more obfuscation. Until we look this problem squarely in the face, it will continue to metastasize. Unless we deal with right wing eliminationism, we will not transform the losses caused by Mateen’s attack on Pulse into lasting positive change.    This exhibit is intended for an audience of people sympathetic to the victims who were killed and injured during the Pulse shooting. I do not intend to convince those who feel othe...