Frontiers of Democracy 2014

I’m with more than 140 scholars, practitioners, and activists from as far away as India, Ukraine, and Israel at Frontiers of Democracy 2014. We are streaming some of the conference live, but another good way to check in on the conversation is to follow the Twitter hashtag #demfront. So far, I’ve hear lots of tough, passionate, and thoughtful conversation about whether the small-scale democratic practices that we create–practices marked by deliberative and relational values–have anything to do with the large-scale structures that dominate our lives. One way that they might relate is by actually shoring up existing institutions, at the expense of justice. But can we critically assess powerful structures in a way that gives us agency? If this conference became a critical seminar on global crony capitalism, would we do anything differently after we left?

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About Peter

Associate Dean for Research and the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Tufts University's Tisch College of Civic Life. Concerned about civic education, civic engagement, and democratic reform in the United States and elsewhere.