The Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of DemocracyCo-sponsored by the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality & Women
and the Latin American and Latino Studies Program
Watch a video of the event here.
A panel discussion featuring KATHA POLLITT, JANE MANSBRIDGE, DIANNE PINDERHUGHES, and GARY SEGURA.
ISSUES OF SEX, GENDER, AND RACE have come to the fore during this election cycle. The presidential candidate of one of the major parties has built a campaign around hypermasculinity and white identity, while battles over racial profiling and police violence, immigration, transgender rights, and abortion have raised the stakes for both parties. Wherever the campaigns are in late September, Penn DCC has invited four astute commentators and scholars to help trace the complicated, and in many ways unprecedented, roles that sex, gender, and race have played in the politics of 2016.
JANE MANSBRIDGE, Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values at the Harvard Kennedy School, is the author of Beyond Adversary Democracy (1983), an empirical and normative study of face-to-face democracy, and the award-winning Why We Lost the ERA (1986), a study of anti-deliberative dynamics in social movements based on organizing for an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. She is also editor or coeditor of the volumes Beyond Self-Interest (1990), Feminism(1994), Oppositional Consciousness (2001), Deliberative Systems (2012), and Political Negotiation: A Handbook(2015). Her current work includes studies of representation, democratic deliberation, everyday activism, and the public understanding of free-rider problems.
DIANNE PINDERHUGHES is Notre Dame Presidential Faculty Fellow, and Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Political Science. Her research addresses inequality with a focus on racial, ethnic and gender politics and public policy in the Americas. Her publications include Uneven Roads: An Introduction to US Racial and Ethnic Politics(co-author; 2014); Race and Ethnicity in Chicago Politics: A Reexamination of Pluralist Theory (1987); Black Politics After the Civil Rights Revolution: Collected Essays (forthcoming); Contested Transformation: Race, Gender, and the Changing Face of Political Leadership in 21st Century America (co-author; forthcoming).
KATHA POLLITT is well known for her wit and her keen sense of both the ridiculous and the sublime. Her “Subject to Debate” column, which the Washington Post called “the best place to go for original thinking on the left,” appears every other week in The Nation. Many of Pollitt’s contributions to The Nation are compiled in three books: Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism(1995); Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture (2001); and Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time (2006). Her recent books include Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (2014).
GARY M. SEGURA is the Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor of Public Policy at Stanford University. His work focuses on issues of political representation and social cleavages, the domestic politics of wartime public opinion, and the politics of America’s growing Latino minority. Among his most recent publications are Latino America: How America’s Most Dynamic Population is Poised to Transform the Politics of the Nation (co-author, 2014); "The Future is Ours:" Minority Politics, Political Behavior, and the Multiracial Era of American Politics (co-author, 2011), and two books with the Latino National Survey team: Latinos in the New Millennium: An Almanac of Opinion, Behavior, and Policy Preferences (2012), and Latino Lives in America: Making It Home (2010).