Davis Award Winner

Rex Troumbley
Manoa

Rex Troumbley is a graduate assistant in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.

Troumbley’s primary teaching objective is that students leave his class understanding how power relations organize everything from the trash getting picked up to states going to war. He accomplishes this objective by combining political science methods for analyzing power with the tools students find useful for becoming engaged in their world.

His research deals with how taboo language—cursing, swearing, profanity, obscenity and racial slurs—is managed by medical, legal and technical institutions in the United States.

Most recently, his research has explored the extent to which digital technologies have been used to steer users away from undesirable behaviors, specifically interventions into the “pre-speech” of users, which work to make their expressions “pre-dictable.”