Teaching Villainification in Social Studies

In this collection, scholars from the United States, Canada, and Australia examine the concepts of villainification and anti-villainification in social studies curriculum, popular culture, as well as within sociocultural contexts and their implications. Villainification is the process of identifying an individual or a small group of individuals as the sole source of a larger evil. Anti-villainification considers the messy space in between individual and group culpability in order to help students develop a sense of responsibility to each other as humans in communities on this planet. Chapter authors examine topics related to U.S. politics, financial education, Holocaust education, difficult histories, apocalypse fiction, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, technology use, LGBTQ school experiences, rape culture, geographies of invasion, and the female body. Taken together, these inquiries into villainification offer thoughtful and powerful insights for teaching about historical wrongdoing in more nuanced ways, addressing the responsibility we all have to create a better world.

Book Features:

Pushes the field of social studies to develop a more nuanced understanding of the villains of the past and present. Invites educators to become more thoughtful about not only curriculum but also the world around us. Helps readers to more deeply understand how easily forms of banal evil can touch our lives within and beyond the classroom, and what we might do about it. Examines how systemic forces can influence "average" individuals to cause or contribute to great societal harm. Includes teacher-friendly engagements with theory, using examples from middle and high school classrooms. Offers a wide range of contexts related to social studies education, including civics, economics, geography, and history.