The Role of Public Discourse in Democratic Retrenchment and Reinvigoration

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The conference’s theme, “Democracy: Retrenchment, Renovation, & Reimagination” encourages us to consider the ebb and flow of democratic projects over time, and to imagine how the promises of democracy might be renewed despite current backsliding around the globe. The conference organizers also challenge us to think capaciously about democratic processes, with retrenchment and renovation or reimagination never being mutually exclusive categories. Advances and setbacks for democratic practices are always co-occurring and co-evolving, especially when considered across groups and across the globe.

This panel brings together scholars working in a range of subfields to present new work on the role of public discourse in democratic retrenchment and reinvigoration. Specifically, these papers consider, from a variety of perspectives, the role that state and non-state actors have in educating the public about democratic processes and enactments of “justice”; the ways in which religious discourse can be mobilized to undermine democratic practices across national and religious contexts; the effects of anti-democratic policies targeting trans people on their public perception as suicidal subjects; and how UN resolutions passively affirmed by consensus enable member states to appear to be adhering to democratic norms while continuing exclusionary practices domestically.

These papers engage a range of empirical and theoretical traditions in American politics, public law, comparative politics, critical theory, and international relations, bringing literatures too-often siloed from each other into conversation through shared analytical categories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. The ebbs and flows of democratic projects are ever-present, and these papers critically consider how several current instantiations of these co-occurring processes can be better understood individually, and in relation to each other, in our present moment of global democratic retrenchment.

Sub Unit

• Division 54: Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics

Individual Presentations

• “Corporate Criminals” and Other Oxymorons in a Fraying Democracy - Be Stone, Rhodes College

• From Sinners to Terrorists: Anti-LGBTQ+ Rhetoric in Turkey and the United States - Sumru Atuk, Ithaca College

• Toward a Genealogy of Transgender Suicide - Alison Elizabeth Parks, Stetson University

• SOGI Inclusion in the UN General Assembly Free and Fair Election Resolution - Ariel Gabriella Mekler, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Chair

• Be Stone Rhodes College

Discussant

• Alyson Cole Queens College & The Graduate Center, CUNY