There is still room to register and pay to hold a spot for Frontiers of Democracy 2018 (June 21-23 in Boston). Although many slots on the agenda are filled, there is still room for a few more proposals for sessions or presentations. The following is an incomplete list of the confirmed speakers and sessions, with several more in the pipeline for approval.

Keynotes

“Innovating Democracy Reform”
Josh Silver, Founder & Executive Director, Represent.us

“Activism under Fire: Violence, Poverty and Collective Action in Rio de Janeiro”
Anjuli Fahlberg, Northeastern University

“Fear and Present Danger”
Kelly Greenhill, Tufts University

“The Disenfranchised”
Sekwan R. Merritt, a formerly incarcerated person who advocates for an end to mass incarceration in America

“Overcoming Civic Fragmentation Through Public Work”
Harry Boyte, Augsburg College

“These Words: A Century of Printing, Writing, and Reading in Boston’s Chinese Community”
Susan Chinsen, Managing Director, The Chinese Historical Society of New England

Presentations and Sessions

(The category headings are for information only. Some titles refer to standalone sessions, while others will be combined to create panels. The panels may not be organized along these topical lines.)

Institutions in Communities

“How Can Museums Strengthen a Civil Society?”
Abby Pfisterer, Education Specialist; Magdalena Mieri, National Museum of American History; Rebekah Hardingrharding, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library; Michelle Martz, Lincoln Cottage; Teresita Paniagua, La Casita; Noelle Trent, National Civil Rights Museum; Dory Lerner, National Civil Rights Museum; Abby Kiesa, Director of Impact, CIRCLE, Tisch College

“The Role of Religious Communities in Strengthening Democracy”
Elizabeth Gish, Western Kentucky University, and John Dedrick, Kettering Foundation

“Civic Tinkering as Democratic Practice”
Scott Tate, Virginia Tech

Youth Voice

“The 2016 Boston Student Walkout Movement: Stories, Strategies, and Impacts”
Andrew King, Mark Warren, Mariette Ayala, Sheetal Gowda, Kate Kelly, Jeff Moyer, and Luis Navarro

“Unchaining the Power of Student Voices”
Frank LoMonte, The Brechner Center, and Zack Mezera, Providence Student Union

“Building Agency and Voice in Student Activists”
Pamela Conners and Leila Brammer, Gustavus Adolphus College

Media and Tech

“Data Justice: A Hands-On Workshop”
Libby Falck, MIT

“Civic Entertainment”
Anushka Shah, MIT Media Lab

“Votes that Count and Voters Who Don’t: How Journalists Sideline Electoral Participation”
Sharon Jarvis, University of Texas at Austin and Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life

“If Only Journalists Care about the Future of Journalism, Democracy is in Trouble”
Fiona Morgan, Free Press

“What are the Responsibilities of Civic Technology?”
Erhardt Graeff, MIT Media Lab

“Bridging the US Political Divide Online: What we Learned from Using Big Data”
Kate Mytty, Build Up

Education (K12 and College)

“Civic Learning and Young Citizens: Democratic Engagements in Higher Education “
Ivy Dhar, School of Development Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), and Nidhi S. Sabharwal, Centre for Policy Research in Higher Education (CPRHE), National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), India

“Deliberative Dialogue in Classrooms and Other Settings”
Sharyn Lowenstein and Denny Frey, Lasell College

Connecting the Public and Government

“The Missing Link: Connecting Our Work to The People Who Need It”
Larry Schooler, National Civic League

“State of the Congress: Staff Perspectives on Congressional Capacity”
Kathy Goldschmidt, Congressional Management Foundation

Getting Past Division

“How can we productively talk about divisiveness in a time of polarized public discourse?”         
Elizabeth Gish, Western Kentucky University, and John Dedrick, Kettering Foundation

“Civility In Our Democracy – Collaborating and Rebuilding Bridges of Trust, and Respect”
Cheryl Graeve and Ted Celeste, National Institute for Civil Discourse

State-Wide Strategies

“Democracy in your backyard: Building local and state capacity for participatory public engagement”
Quixada Moore-Vissing, Michele Holt-Shannon, and Bruce Mallory, New Hampshire Listens

“Civic Health in a Changing Landscape: Arizona as a Case Study”
Kristi Tate, Center for the Future of Arizona

Fifty years after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination–as new social movements are again taking to the streets–a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll asked respondents to compare the protests of the late sixties to today. I show responses for all adults and for 18-29s, because I was curious what young adults are learning and thinking about the sixties.

These results are ambiguous, because individuals can have varying opinions of the sixties and of today, but they are only asked to compare the two. A person could think that the protests of the 1968 were terribly violent and extreme, and today’s are worrying but not quite as bad. Or a person might think that the ’60s were violent and it’s great to see some of that righteous rage coming back. Or that neither were violent. By the same token, a person could feel that protesters in the ’60s were well organized, and today’s are even more so, or that both were badly organized. . … And we can multiply the possibilities.

Let’s assume (as a rough approximation) that you are enthusiastic about today’s protests if you think they are organized and effective but not extreme or violent, and that they are at least as good–by those criteria–as the protests of the late 1960s were. So measured, enthusiasm seems reasonably high for all Americans, but higher for youth.

I wouldn’t use these survey results to actually assess the social movements of the sixties vs. our time. I doubt that most people have thought deeply about the wide range of movements in these two rapidly changing periods. For instance, there is an interesting debate about whether the same forms of organization are necessary today as in 1968, but I wouldn’t call random phone numbers to ask the people who answer what comes immediately to mind on this question.

I do find these results interesting as a possible bellwether of support for social movement politics. On the whole, young people seem to perceive the current array of protest movements as reasonably organized, effective, nonviolent, and mainstream. That should encourage them to join.

See also: Why Civil Resistance Works; a sketch of a theory of social movements; the New Social Movements of the seventies, eighties, and today.

While the student anti-gun student movement attracts national attention, two new publications have arrived in my inbox that address youth engagement in nonviolent social movements. Both depict youth as peacemakers rather than victims or perpetrators of violence, but both require significant caveats.

Taylor et al. provide a useful literature review with mixed findings. In some studies, exposure to political violence and abuse during childhood predicts more empathy and more civic engagement–even in some of the worst situations in the world. That suggests that youth can be peacemakers rather than victims of violence. In other studies, the relationships are negative.

Using a longitudinal dataset from Northern Ireland, the authors find (if I understand their complex statistics correctly) that kids who have seen more sectarian violence and discrimination by age 10 are more empathetic and more engaged in their communities, but that prolonged exposure to such violence reduces engagement. Empathy and engagement are positively correlated, but engagement falls for everyone during the teen years.

Dahlum finds that “Campaigns with a high degree of involvement by students and educated protesters are more likely to be nonviolent” and “Campaigns with a high degree of involvement by students and educated protesters are more likely to succeed”–but the latter is only true because students and educated protesters are more likely to opt for nonviolent strategies, which are more successful than violence. (See Why Civil Resistance Works.)

A casual look at Dahlum’s article, which is entitled “Students in the Streets,” might suggest that this is a study of youth. She is actually focused on people of all ages who have a lot of education. That is basically a proxy for social advantage. For example, she mentions a movement in Bangladesh that was led by “students, doctors, lawyers, [and] intellectuals,” among others. That is not a description of an age group but of a social class.

Dahlum combines students with graduates (of any age). If we view them separately, students have these characteristics:

1. They tilt toward the young. Even in very poor countries, many (and often most) 7-year-olds are students. But nowhere are most 75-year-olds in school. Not only are students experiencing childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood as developmental stages, but they represent the newest generation in any society. (See this post on age versus generational effects.)
2. They tilt toward the upper socio-economic tiers, because education is an expense and a path to income and power. This tilt varies by country and by age. Seven-year-olds in Sweden are students regardless of their social class. But at age 20, only the elite in many countries are still in school.
3. Being a student is an occupation, a way of life. It may facilitate social activism because schools and colleges concentrate large groups of peers in places where they can be mobilized (or mobilize themselves); because they often are better protected against retaliation than many workers are; and because institutions devoted to learning are good places to spread news and ideas. (See also: why do students sometimes lead social change?)

Therefore, students often play disproportionately important roles in social movements. But that is only partly a matter of age and generation. Social class and occupation are also relevant.