Identifying Voters or Suppressing the Vote? Race, Partisanship, and Resistance in the Politics of Voter Identification

This event occurred on:  Please join us for a special presentation by Deva Woodly, Assistant Professor of Politics and Director of Undergraduate Political Studies at the New School. After her presentation, there will be a Discussion (and) Q&A led by, Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. 

Deva Woodly Bio: I am interested in how democratic politics actually happens in the contemporary context. I approach this broad interest in a non-traditional way. Most American political science focuses inquiry on institutions, choice, and decision-making. By contrast, I focus my attention on the ways that public meanings define the problems that the polity understands itself to share as well as the range of choices that citizens perceive to be before them. Questions that focus on the way that public meanings shape our politics require a careful engagement with public discourse, like that found in newspapers, shared through social networks online, or spoken in the meeting houses of civic and social movement organizations. These discourses provide an empirical record of what members of the polity acknowledge as politically valuable as well as clues to the logics that people commonly use to associate their beliefs and values with the problems that they recognize in the world as they find it, imbricated as it is with all the structural, institutional, group-based and affective elements of life and politics. This observation of the central practical importance of discourse to democratic politics as we actually experience it as members of the polity, leads me to utilize methodologies, both theoretical and empirical, that reveal political discourse as a practical source of information, including statistical examinations of discursive content and theoretical analyses of the meanings unearthed therein. 

Deva Woodly is the author of “The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance” The way that movements communicate with the general public matters for their chances of lasting success. This book argues that the potential for movement-led political change is significantly rooted in mainstream democratic discourse and specifically in the political acceptance of new issues by news media, the general public, and elected officials. This is true to some extent for any group wishing to alter status quo distributions of rights and/or resources, but is especially important for grass-roots challengers who do not already have a place of legitimated influence in the polity. By examining the talk of two contemporary movements, the living wage and marriage equality, during the critical decade after their emergence between 1994 and 2004, the book shows that while the living wage movement experienced over 120 policy victories and the marriage equality movement suffered many policy defeats, the overall impact that marriage equality had on changing American politics was much greater than that of the living wage because of its deliberate effort to change mainstream political discourse, and, thus, the public understanding of the politics surrounding the issue.