Civic Belonging in the U.S. (free/registration required)

Civic Belonging in an Anti-Democratic Age
Tuesday, November 17 | 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Husky Union Building (HUB) Lyceum
FREE (registration required)

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Growing concerns about the health of America’s 250-year experiment in representative democracy should prompt us to think deeply about how civic belonging has been defined in U.S. society since the nation’s founding and what current efforts to restrict access and opportunities for civic participation mean for our collective futures. Civic Belonging in an Anti-Democratic Age brings together UW faculty whose teaching and research straddle law, politics, human rights, urban studies, and digital technologies for a lively interdisciplinary conversation about the stakes of belonging in U.S. society. Join us as we examine the current moment and ask how we can work towards a more inclusive democratic future.

Meet the faculty participants (Top Left to Bottom Right): Megan Ming Francis, Angelina Godoy, Erin McElroy, and Stephanie Smallwood.

Megan Ming Francis (Political Science, Law, Societies, & Justice)
Megan Ming Francis is the G. Alan and Barbara Delsman Associate Professor of Political Science and an Associate Professor of Law, Societies, and Justice. She specializes in the study of American politics, with broad interests in criminal punishment, Black political activism, philanthropy, and the post-civil war South. Francis is the author of the award winning book, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State.

Angelina Godoy (Law, Societies, & Justice, UW Center for Human Rights)
Angelina Snodgrass Godoy is the Helen H. Jackson Endowed Chair in Human Rights and Director at the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington, Professor of International Studies within the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, and Professor of Law, Societies, and Justice, as well as Adjunct Professor of Sociology. A sociologist by training, her research focuses on human rights in Central and Latin America. She teaches courses on immigration and migrant justice.

Erin McElroy (Geography)
Erin McElroy is an Associate Professor of Geography whose work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, fascism, empire, and racial capitalism, alongside housing justice organizing, countermapping, and transnational solidarities. They run the Anti-Eviction Lab at UW, where much of the student and community partner driven research focuses upon Landlord Tech Watch—a platform dedicated to producing collective knowledge about landlord-driven surveillance techniques. Newer lab work is also focusing on technolibertarian urbanism in the U.S. and beyond.

Stephanie Smallwood (UW Honors, History, & CHID)
Stephanie Smallwood (moderator of the event) is the director of UW Honors as well as being an Associate Professor in both History and Comparative History of Ideas (CHID) and the Dio Richardson Endowed Professor in History. Her research focuses on the histories of slavery, race and colonialism in the early modern Atlantic world. Smallwood is the author of Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, winner of the 2008 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

Learn more about the Global Challenges–Interdisciplinary Thinking series.

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