"Are You Popular? School Bullies and Bystanders in Postwar America"
This talk explores assessments of young people’s popularity in teachers’ and principals’ notes, oral histories, personal recollections and correspondence, high school newspapers, psychological works, crisis center manuals, and youth advocacy organizations, particularly representing LGBTQ youth and young people with intellectual disabilities. I trace an emerging perception over the course of the postwar period that popularity was not solely necessary for a happy or simply tolerable experience in primary and secondary school, but vital for the social and even literal survival of young students. In tracing this shift, I explore the ways in which anti-bullying advocates came to focus increasingly on the figure of the bystander to bullying, including teachers, who were at times deemed to refuse a shared vulnerability to unpopularity with the bullied young. I suggest that within a post-Holocaust sensibility not only did bystanders harbour a profound resonance with abettors of political hatred, but they also were seen to evoke a destructive passivity within the daily moral relations of the ‘popular’ and the ‘unpopular’ in school contexts.
ZOOM LINK: https://yorku.zoom.us/j/96770661435