Democracy Labs (D.Labs)

Course Instructor: Roman Zinigrad

Education is believed to be the strongest engine of change. It is trusted to restore justice and remedy social wrongs where law and politics fail to deliver. But education can also perpetuate injustice and become an instrument of oppression. Even with the best intentions, educational policies often uphold hidden biases, sidestep pressing moral dilemmas, or hopelessly fall behind current social needs. This course seeks to understand both the promise and limits of educational tools in achieving social justice.

In this Democracy Lab we will begin by exploring conceptual and theoretical schemes presently available for understanding contemporary controversies about education such as systemic barriers to education, links between lack of education and exploitation, bodily autonomy, “conversion therapy”, “don’t say gay” laws, science and religion in schools, homeschooling and unschooling, and digital transformation of education. We will explore how education constructs and is constructed by culture, religion, and economy; how it affects and is affected by the institutions of family, community, and state; and how it can achieve equality or inequality. In the second half of the course, we will then move towards developing educational prototypes that increase social goals. Our intention is to identify the building blocks of successful educational solutions that lead to reproductive, racial, economic, LGBTQ+ or disability justice, which implement legal, political, and entrepreneurial mechanisms.

Syllabus 

Course Instructors: Stephen W. Sawyer & Roman Zinigrad

Radicalization and polarization have come to define social action and mobilization across Europe, Asia and the Americas and beyond. This course seeks to understand how to achieve social and political change without resorting to civilian and state violence by examining the actors, networks, and wider social contexts driving radicalization, particularly among young people in urban and peri-urban areas. In this Democracy Lab we will begin by exploring conceptual and theoretical tools presently available for understanding this phenomenon, including the present European Research Grant “D.Rad” within the Center for Critical Democracy Studies. In the second half of the course we will then move towards developing prototypes for how to de-escalate political, individual and collective violence. Our intention is to identify the building blocks of radicalization, which include a sense of being victimized; a sense of being thwarted or lacking agency in established legal and political structures; and coming under the influence of “us vs them” identity formulations.

Syllabus

Course Instructors: Peter Hägel & Stephen W. Sawyer

In our age of globalization, citizenship is experiencing major transformations, in practice as in theory. Migrants destroying their passports, states offering citizenship for sale, an increasing number of people holding multiple passports – what do such realities entail? As global governance has gained traction, citizenship, a concept that used to be conceived in national terms, is receiving a cosmopolitan imagination, which is being opposed, sometimes violently, by nationalistic forces. But what could global citizenship consist of? Our Democracy Lab explores this question in very concrete terms. It provides a hands-on, design-thinking, experimental space where students elaborate a specific problem of global citizenship and devise a potential solution together.

Syllabus