*For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

About the Seminar: Structural racism threatens the principles that undergird the American creed. A national, multiracial solidarity is the best means of mitigating racism’s effects. The sociopolitical strategies of Black America – grounded in moral claims consonant with the creed but fashioned to be in alignment with contemporary national interests – provide a model for the type of solidarity the United States desperately needs.

This argument is explored in detail in When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America. Through an examination of political science and sociological frameworks, alongside personal and historical narratives, it argues that structural racism is a crime of the state, that color-conscious policy is preferable to colorblindness, and that the American civil religion is central to national solidarity. Concluding with policy recommendations, the book offers the next step forward on the intractable issue of racism.
 

 

About the Speaker: Theodore R. Johnson is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Fellows Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, where he undertakes research on race, politics, and American identity. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, he was a National Fellow at New America and a Commander in the United States Navy, serving for twenty years in a variety of positions, including as a White House Fellow in the first Obama administration and as speechwriter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His work on race relations has appeared in prominent national publications across the political spectrum, including the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review, among others.

 

About the Seminar: From foreign influence operations disrupting democratically-held elections to anti-vaccine conspiracies undermining global public health, disinformation has drawn attention to the many ways technology engenders new and complex challenges for civic life. This talk will explore the role of identity-based propaganda in contemporary influence operations and its consequences for democracy and civic life.

 

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About the Speaker: Samantha Bradshaw is a postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL, the Digital Civil Society Lab, and the Program on Democracy and the Internet.

There is no secret formula for success. But what if there were a pattern you could follow? A way of mapping the route and navigating the obstacles that arise?

Michael Barber has spent many years advising governments, businesses and major sporting teams around the world on how to achieve ambitious goals on time. In this book, he applies the wisdom he has gained from dealing with large, complex organizations and elite athletes to help anyone tackle their most challenging goals.

Drawing on the stories of historic visionaries and modern heroes – from Galileo to Rosa Parks, Gareth Southgate to Justin Trudeau – Accomplishment blends personal anecdote and proven strategy to trace a blueprint that can be applied to any area of life.

At the book’s core is the need to remember the ethical basis for what you have set out to do. Doing the right thing for the right reason is the reward that will see you through the criticism and setbacks. So whatever it is that you aspire to do – run a marathon, transform a school or run a public service for millions – this book will inspire you to get going and to bridge the gap between vision and reality.

Click here to purchase the book.

 

About the Author: Sir Michael Barber is a global expert on the implementation of ambitious change in large, complicated systems. He has advised governments on every continent and worked with major private sector organizations, schools and universities in Britain and the US. In addition, Barber has advised Team Sky, the elite cycling team and, since 2016, he has been a member of the Football Association's Technical Advisory Board, which helps the FA prepare England's teams, both men and women, for major tournaments.

 

 

About the Seminar: As democracy hangs in the balance around the globe, people all over the world are pouring into the streets. Yet, the overwhelming response is stasis. Can people-powered movements make change possible? Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st c. America is a new book that looks systematically at the outliers to identify the characteristics that successful movement organizations share. Drawing on six cases in the United States, the book shows how these movements won not by doing things we all know--registering voters, canvassing neighborhoods and so on--but instead by negotiating for power in ways that rejected the false choice between idealism and pragmatism, between working inside the system and outside the system, between articulating a bold vision and making political compromises. Through careful analysis and vivid storytelling, the story turns conventional stereotypes of activists on their head.

 

 

About the Speaker: Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in the study of organizing, movements, civic engagement, and democracy. She has published four books and numerous articles in the American Political Science Review, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and numerous other outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a fifth book, to be published with Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House), about faith and race in America, with a particular focus on evangelical megachurches.

This seminar is presented in partnership with the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.

About the Seminar: Domestic migration separates voters into nationally- and locally-minded electorates because migrants differ from non-migrants regarding the strength of their local identities. To demonstrate how migration alters the importance of local identities, I study sub-national variation in the nationalization of local elections: in out-migration areas, strong local identities mean that non-migrant voters are active in local politics and consider locally defined issues when voting, while weak local identities lower migrant voters' ability to do so in in-migration areas. I support my argument using household panel data and comprehensive data on cross-county migration, national and sub-national elections, and civil society organizations in contemporary Germany. My identification strategy uses a shift-share instrument for migration and exploits a large-scale welfare reform in 2005 that lastingly altered domestic migration flows. My focus on local identities calls for a reappraisal of conventional descriptions of contemporary democratic politics, which mostly examines divides in national politics. The paper identifies a new research agenda on the political consequences of domestic migration, which has important implications for our understanding of democratic polarization and local service delivery.

 

 

About the Speaker: Hans Lueders holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His research seeks to understand the causes and consequences of political inequality in different political contexts. Hans is currently working on a book project that links political inequality in contemporary democratic societies to domestic migration. Additionally, Hans researches political inequality in closed authoritarian regimes, where state institutions ensure that citizens have little political say. His work identifies little-acknowledged ways through which citizens can still influence politics despite this extreme inequality. Moreover, his research on unauthorized migration in the United States studies political inequality from the perspective of a politically marginalized group. It seeks to understand how unauthorized immigrants navigate life while being politically disenfranchised.  Hans’ work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, and the European Political Science Review, among others.

About the Seminar: Do voters value their political party over democracy? This paper examines how citizens make the trade-off between party loyalty and democracy when a president of their party violates essential democratic norms. Using two large-n original survey experiments, I show that partisanship is a predominant lens through which people view democracy. I find that, while in the aggregate people are fairly sensitive to differences in the severity of norm violations, they often choose their party and their president over support for those norms. Additionally, I demonstrate that members of the Democratic and Republican parties are starkly different in their treatment of democracy; Republican respondents have a higher tolerance for norm violations than Democratic respondents in all scenarios. This paper highlights the influence presidents have over democracy due to strong party allegiance.

 

 

About the Speaker: Alejandra is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. She studies how Americans think about democracy in an era of polarized politics and how presidents influence conceptions of democratic norms. Broadly, her research interests include presidential influence, democratic norms, voter behavior, presidential elections, experimental methods, survey methodology, and gender and politics. She graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA in Political Science.