Democracy Cohort
The Engagements Program is seeking 35 students who are motivated to study and practice democracy. These students will form a special Engagements Cohort dedicated to a holistic study of democracy—as an idea, as a reality, and as an activity—over the course of the 2025-2026 academic year.
In 2025 and 2026, voters across the U.S. and more than sixty other countries will cast their ballots in local, state, and national elections. You may be one of them. Together, we will consider how democracies function and/or falter amid concerns about rising authoritarianism, climate change, migration, and other global crises. As a cohort, students will examine and begin to understand differences between democratic systems, the ways that democracies express themselves, how governments interact with a broad and diverse body politic, and intellectual genealogies examining historical and contemporary democracies.
In addition to pursuing these intellectual inquiries, students will make democracy happen. They will receive training in voter registration and implement a voter registration campaign to register their peers across engagement classes. UVA’s Board of Visitors is appointed by Virginia's Governor, and a new governor will be elected in 2025. So, this is a chance for you and your fellow students to have a say in your own university. And because democracy doesn’t end with elections, students will also learn how governments make day-to-day decisions, adopting a local government board or commission to study and follow across the whole year. Students will attend at least one public meeting per quarter throughout the year to gain a fuller understanding of public oversight and the public decision-making process more granularly.
Finally, students in this Engagements Cohort will take a field trip to Washington, D.C., to ask questions about democracy in the United States’ democratic center.
Student members of the Democracy Engagements Cohort will:
- Take a series of 4 Engagement classes together over the course of the year
- Organize and implement a voter registration campaign
- Take a field trip to Washington, D.C.
Students interested in participating in the Democracy Cohort should answer the following prompt in their pre-enrollment survey:
Increasingly, people are sounding the alarm on the state of democracy. What do you think is the biggest threat to democracy, or do you think this alarm is overblown?
Courses
Engaging Differences: “Hateinanny: Fascism, Antifascism, and the Global Far Right”
David Walsh
The 2010s saw an explosion of interest in the growth of the global far right. From the rise to power of right-wing populists like Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Boris Johnson in Great Britain, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and of course Donald Trump in America, to a spate of anti-immigrant shootings across the developed world, to the deadly violence at the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, the power and influence of far-right politics has been one of the defining features of the past decade. But the far right did not just suddenly form ex nihilio in the 2010s. In this course we will explore the development and growth of the far right around the world in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a particular emphasis on how dynamics of power shape differences in the world and how social inequities are produced and patterned along lines of difference. This is not a comprehensive class – it is not possible to exhaustively explore every dimension of the international far right in the course of a single semester – so we will be focusing primarily on Western Europe and North America, but paying close attention to the concept of “empire,” its importance in the right-wing imagination in imperial states, and the impact of decolonization on far-right politics and what develops into the self-described “white power” movement at the end of the century.
Empirical Engagement: Information and Democracy
David Singerman
A democratic government has many questions about the people who it thinks it represents, and who think it represents them. Who are all these people? Where do they live? What do they do? What do they care about? (And, of course: who voted for whom? Meanwhile, the people of a democracy have questions too. What is my government doing in my name? What does it know and what is it hiding? What do my fellow citizens and noncitizens think?
In this course, we’ll ask how democracy—mostly but not only in the United States—has tried to organize, share, and process different kinds of information. We’ll look at how governments and people learn about each other, through elections, censuses, bureaucracy, espionage, and protests. And we’ll explore how we can learn things about our own democratic governments—including learning how to file your own Freedom of Information Act request.
Aesthetic Engagement: “What Does Democracy Look Like?”
Laura Goldblatt
When protesters gather in democratic nations, as part of their calls they often chant “this is what democracy looks like!” But what, exactly, do they mean? Does democracy have a “look”?
In this Aesthetics Engagement, we will consider art, campaign materials, music, and credos from the founding of the United States to the present day to determine if, and how, democracy represents itself differently from other political systems and why such differences matter. For instance, we will consider the United States’ first postage stamps, which featured a dead president and Founding Father, and compare them to the Penny Black issued by the United Kingdom, the first postage stamp ever created, which featured the living Queen Victoria, to ask crucial questions about the role of history in democracies and how visual iconography reflects it. We will also turn to Cold War propaganda in the US and USSR to ask if abstract art is more “democratic” than figurative representations and, if so, how? In doing so, we will work together to understand political systems as a collective ethos that structure, guide, and delimit our everyday affective experiences.
Ethical Engagement: What’s the Problem? Ethical Problems in Democracy
Gillet Rosenblith
Any cursory look at the news in the last few years, especially following Jan 6, 2021, makes it clear that people in the United States are worried about the state of its democracy. U.S. citizens and onlookers are asking questions including: Does U.S. democracy work? Is it failing? Why does it seem more fragile now than in previous years? In our class, we will be examining some of the issues which influence the strength of our democracy. We’ll consider these issues both historically and contemporarily, paying particular attention to the ethical ramifications of these problems. Who do these problems most impact and how? What’s at stake if these problems continue as they are or worsen? What are some of the ethical solutions being posed to solve these problems?
A seven-week course can by no means be comprehensive. Accordingly, this course considers the ethical implications of four significant problems in the implementation of democracy in the United States, mostly related to elections and representation. Even these examinations will have to be somewhat superficial. Still, as a class we will consider what the ethical problems the practice of democracy has engendered in the U.S. says about our democracy and democracy more broadly. In each unit, we will examine these problems historically and contemporarily. The problems we will examine in the class are: voting; representation; money in politics; and federalism and state preemption.