Democracy Cohort
The Engagements Program is seeking 35 students who are eager to study and pursue democracy. These students and their Engagements professors will form a special Engagements Cohort devoted to an all-embracing study of democracy—as an idea, as a fact, and as a practice—over the course of the academic year. Together, we will consider how we might define democracy, how democratic values are enacted, and how publics struggle to achieve them—on the large scale and the small, across the globe. How do democracies function or falter in the midst of authoritarian surges, climate breakdown, battles over migration, and other global crises? As a Cohort, we will examine and begin to understand differences between democratic systems; the ways that people in democracies express themselves; and how local, state, and national governments interact with a broad and diverse body politic. And we will also learn about how democratic ideals are contested, enacted, and even eroded by many actors in society–like workers, artists, teachers, or students–who perform these acts in many spaces, like public plazas, community centers, museums, or media outlets. To grasp all this, we will study past and present democracies and their practices.
Besides pursuing these inquiries, if you join this Cohort, you will make democracy happen on different levels of individual and community participation, as you get to know the democratic elements at work in many spheres of your own life. And finally, you and the Cohort’s other students will take a field trip to engage with public art as democratic expression. Like all Cohorts, we aim to build, throughout the academic year, a community of inquiry and engagement with the liberal arts. And we hope that through this, you’ll make friendships and connections that will last throughout your time at UVA. Thus, over the course of the year, all students in this Cohort will together take the four Engagement courses listed below, in the order given.
To Apply
Answer the following prompt in your pre-enrollment survey (limit 200 words, emphasize what interests you most. Use of AI is prohibited.)
What do you think is the biggest threat to democracy? Or do you think the threats are overblown? And of the democratic elements you find in your own life, which would you highlight as truly key to building thriving democracies?
Courses
Ethical Engagement: Fascism, Antifascism, and the Global Far Right
David Austin Walsh
This class is a hybrid history and political theory course designed to introduce students to the broad history of the “right” as a political formation in the 20th and 21st centuries, with particular emphasis on right-wing antiliberal and antidemocratic traditions, including various different forms of fascism, National Socialism, conservatism, paleoconservatism, white nationalism, MAGAism, and postliberalism. A primary goal for the course is for students to develop an understanding of the intellectual and political challenges to liberalism and liberal democracy posed by right-wing political thinkers, ranging from historical actors like Benito Mussolini and Carl Schmitt to contemporaries like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermuele, and of course Donald Trump. In addition to understanding the political and intellectual challenges to liberalism, students will learn to be able to identify key characteristics of fascism and why it emerged as a political force in the 1920s and 1930s; understand how right-wing thinkers of various political stripes have thought about human equality, hierarchy, political economy, biology, race, and gender; understand antifascism as a distinctive political tradition in its own right; and the emergence of various different new strains in right-wing politics in the 21st century, their diagnosis of the crisis of 21st-century liberalism and liberal democracy, and their normative political conclusions. Ethical Engagements aim to help us reflect on what makes some things right and others wrong; some a duty and others a choice; some just and others unjust--or on how to be both strong and merciful. These visions of politics give people answers to those and other questions.
Engaging Differences: Performing Democracy on the Small Scale: Learning Cooperation from African Equatorial Forest People
Michelle Kisliuk
This is a hands-on (and voices and bodies-on) course that explores how the BaAka forest people of Central Africa learn to interact in a radically democratic and egalitarian way via their performance traditions (no experience or special abilities expected!). We will learn to listen carefully, to use our voices strategically in response to what we hear around us, and to put sound and motion into our own world, as a community. We will listen, view, and read about the lives of hunter-foragers in this region of central Africa, and discuss what it is like to live in that environment within that cultural context. Then we consider what elements of that context can be applied to our own. Reading, writing, and singing/dancing together will be part of the course as we explore a polyphonic setting for democratic engagement that can provide an adaptable model for everyday life.
Empirical and Scientific Engagement: They Think WHAT?!? Visions of Politics
Tom Donahue
Liberals scold populists. Greens slag capitalists. Conservatives chide social justice movements. And vice versa. That’s what happens in democracies. But what does it all mean? In these disputes, each group cleaves to a set of ideas about politics. These ideas describe how society works; they set standards by which to judge those workings; they envision the good society; and they tell us how to get there from here. Thus they aim to guide social change. And they do so by calling their holders to carry them out. So, for instance, when fascists strive against libertarians, each struggles over just these ideas: which ones should rule? In this course, we study these visions of politics, or what some call “political ideologies.” We therefore aim to plumb and sound the key ideas of many of the great visions of our time: those named above, and also socialism, anarchism, democracy, and more. What do their main doctrines say? How do they compare with those of other visions? What do they assume about freedom? Or human nature? For each idea and answer, we’ll size up the observations and the experiences of which it tries to make sense, as well as the evidence offered in its support. All this we do to help students Engage Empirically, which is one of the four pillars of the Engagements. And, in grappling with such questions empirically, we are training in the liberal arts: which are the core and pivot of all that UVA has to teach us.
Engaging Aesthetics: The Politics of Public Art
Andreja Siliunas
W.E.B. Du Bois (1926) famously argued that “all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.” This course takes that claim seriously by examining how art functions within democratic life. Through the lens of aesthetics and public art, we will explore democracy not as a settled political system, but as an ongoing process shaped by competing visions of the past, present, and future. For Du Bois, art was a crucial vehicle for articulating the Black experience and challenging racial injustice in a democracy that excluded Black voices. For others – such as the makers of Confederate monuments, muralists across Latin America, and contemporary graffiti writers -- public art has served to legitimize political authority, contest state power, or claim space on behalf of marginalized publics. Across these cases, art becomes a site where democratic ideals are asserted, undermined, or reimagined. We will examine how artists, protestors, community leaders, and political elites create, commission, and manipulate art in public spaces to shape political identities and democratic possibilities. Engaging with monuments, murals, street art, and photographic iconography, the course asks: how do aesthetic forms influence political judgment? How does public art mobilize participation, produce or silence publics, and structure debates over history, justice, and belonging? When does public art expand democratic dialogue, and when does it entrench exclusion and inequality? This course will include a field trip to public art locations and interaction with public artists.