Date:
TANNER LECTURES
SPEAKER: HAHRIE HAN
Moderator: Liz McKenna
Stories of Democracy Realized: Belonging, Becoming, Building
What will it take to reinvigorate democratic self-governance—or people-powered democracy—in the United States? In a time of complex and contentious debates about the state of American democracy, these lectures interrogate the way people and communities do (and do not) practice democracy, with a particular focus on Christian faith communities in America, and the relationship of faith, race, and politics. The first lecture examines core principles that shape possibilities for self-governance, focusing on how we understand what we can become together when we work with each other. The second lecture examines the conditions necessary for that kind of transformation to occur, focusing on the ways people belong to each other, and data on places people have organized to build something new.
About the Speakers
Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in the study of organizing, movements, collective action, and democracy, and is an award-winning author of four books and numerous articles. Her most recent book, Prisms of the People (University of Chicago Press, 2021) was awarded the 2022 Michael Harrington Book Award from the American Political Science Association for “scholarship contributing to the struggle for a better world.” Her other work has been published in leading scholarly outlets including the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, Nature Human Behavior, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and elsewhere, and she has written for public outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a 2022 Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum's Schwab Foundation. She is currently working on a fifth book, to be published with Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House), about faith and race in America, with a particular focus on evangelical megachurches.
Liz McKenna is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on how civil society can both enable and constrain democracy. She uses multiple methods—ethnographic, interview, geospatial, and social network analysis—to study organizations, political power, and social movements in Brazil and the United States.
Liz is the co-author of two books on democratic organizing. Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2021) examines how grassroots organizations in the U.S. successfully exercise political power. Her first book, Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America (Oxford University Press, 2014), analyzed how parties and campaigns interact with—and sometimes act as—social movements. Her dissertation on political terrain shifts in Brazil received the 2021 American Sociological Association's Best Dissertation Award and is the basis of her current book project. Other academic work has been published in International Sociology, Environment and Planning: Politics and Space, the Journal of Community Psychology, and Perspectives on Politics, and by public outlets such as the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Social Science Research Council, and the Washington Post. Prior to graduate school, Liz worked as a political and community organizer in Ohio and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She earned a BA in social studies from Harvard College and a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
About the Series
In collaboration with the Office of the President of Harvard University, the Mahindra Humanities Center hosts annual Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The purpose of the Tanner Lectures is the advancement of scholarly and scientific learning in the field of human values. That purpose embraces the entire range of moral, artistic, intellectual, and spiritual values, both individual and social – the full register of values pertinent to the human condition, interest, behavior, and aspiration.
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a nonprofit corporation administered at the University of Utah. They are funded by an endowment and other gifts received by the University of Utah from Obert Clark Tanner and Grace Adams Tanner. More information: www.tannerlectures.utah.edu.