I'm struck by how many different kinds of psychology people can study in the US (I'm an international student). If I were in a critical/analytical mood I'd suggest it says something about the US being an incredibly medicalized society, where negative emotions and experiences of every kind are transformed into pathologies that demand treatment =p That being said, as a humanities student, in an "obscure" field, I'm not overly inclined to criticize other people's subjects as being "random" or "useless".
If you had a research project along the lines of "the intersection between classical orientalist discourse and contemporary American representations of Islam and Muslims" then that would be interesting - but yeah, as other people have said, framing your project as a "refutation" of Ann Coulter sounds more like bad liberal journalism than academic research. I'm an international student, and whilst I've heard of Coulter, I can promise you that most people outside of the US do not ascribe that much importance to the specific right-wing commentators who seem to attract so much attention and anger within the United States itself, like Coulter, Pat Robertson, an so on.
The specific focus on Coulter aside, it's also worth pointing out that if you want to invoke orientalism/post-colonialism as a theoretical perspective, that is not a straightforward thing to do, and you need to be sensitive to some of the theoretical baggage that comes with Said's critique of orientalism and post-colonial theory more generally - just to pick up on some of your language in your post, you say you would seek to "debunk" Coulter's representations of Islam and Muslims, but one of the theoretical aspects of Said's work that has often been commented on is that, due to the theoretical context and background he is coming from (specifically, the role of Foucault in his work, as distinct from Enlightenment epistemology) he does not really view his work as an attempt to uncover some ultimate "truth" about the orient, beneath the "distorting" influence of orientalism, in fact he is very resistant to the idea that there can be a "truthful" or "objective" representation of the orient, in part because the category "orient" is itself internal to orientalist discourse. The notion of "debunking", on the other hand, does suggest some kind of appeal to an ultimate truth or underlying reality. If you were to position your work as operating within Said's paradigm but then invoke vocabulary like "debunk", that could be seen as very problematic.
I'm struck by how many different kinds of psychology people can study in the US (I'm an international student). If I were in a critical/analytical mood I'd suggest it says something about the US being an incredibly medicalized society, where negative emotions and experiences of every kind are transformed into pathologies that demand treatment =p That being said, as a humanities student, in an "obscure" field, I'm not overly inclined to criticize other people's subjects as being "random" or "useless".
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