{"id":469,"date":"2024-10-07T13:17:44","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T13:17:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/?p=469"},"modified":"2024-10-07T18:39:56","modified_gmt":"2024-10-07T18:39:56","slug":"engaging-elections-making-sense-of-students-political-apathy-and-engagement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/2024\/10\/07\/engaging-elections-making-sense-of-students-political-apathy-and-engagement\/","title":{"rendered":"Engaging Elections: Making Sense of Student Engagement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From protesting against genocide in Palestine to demanding political responses on climate change, we are witnessing a surge of student activism across campuses. Yet at the same time, many students feel disengaged from politics and apathetic toward the political processes and institutions in the United States. During our Engaging Elections: The Politics of Teaching as Public Sociology <\/em>webinar<\/a>, we asked panelists how to make sense of \u201cthis combination of fatigue and anger,\u201d and the tension between apathy and political outrage on their campuses.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Johnnie Lotesta kicked off the conversation by reminding us that apathy is not universal among students. She discussed how a subset of the students at Appalachian State tend to be very politically engaged and organized around issues specific to the campus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne thing that I’ve noticed among my students is this sense of sort of a feeling of political efficacy around issues on campus or closer to home. But that doesn’t always translate into local, state or national politics. (…) Young people have their own ideas, and issues that they’re interested in. Sometimes they just don’t always make that immediate connection to how those local issues translate into broader political institutions.\u201d (Lotesta, 10:15<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Edwin Ackerman, engagement and disengagement are a result of the political moment. Students may exude more political interest and energy in moments that feel particularly precarious. For instance, during the Trump presidency, Ackerman\u2019s students were more interested in contextualizing course content and present-day politics\u2013something that has not been carried through to the Biden administration. He began to see complacency alongside political exhaustion as engagement decreased and students went \u201cback to brunch.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI started teaching Fall of 2016, and I also noticed from the get-go \u2026 the interest that students had in the text that I was assigning, in the questions that were being posed, that lasted basically through the Trump years. In a sense, the sort of discussions of texts that can be a hundred years old but are talking about fascism or authoritarianism, or threats. It just seemed to be much more readily obvious why we were reading them. And then all of that\u2026ended swiftly in 2020.\u201d (Ackerman, 22:46<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Cedric de Leon, if part of the tension can be tied to students\u2019 perceptions of their political landscape, another part can only be seen as a result of current party politics and an overall disengagement from what the two national parties offer. Current institutional politics seems to provide no concrete response to the aspirations of students, especially working-class students. They find, however, solidarity, energy, and political efficacy in grassroots movements, even when engaging in national and global political debates. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA number of my students are labor studies students. They’re primarily rank-and-file Union members, right? Union staff. They’re working people, you know. And you ask them about the Democratic party and the Republican party, and you know, and for them, you know, they haven’t really attended to, you know, the needs, desires, and aspirations of working-class people for generations.\u201d (De Leon, 12:52)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\n

Taking this heterogeneity into consideration, Lotesta noted that students are more energized around local issues that feel close to home while struggling to see how these issues connect to larger political problems at the national and international levels. For instance, she finds it productive to connect students with this more immediate dimension of politics, encouraging them to visualize the campus as a microcosm of the broader political landscape while also being a space for political experimentation. To combat apathy, Lotesta utilizes assignments and assessments that encourage students to approach problem-solving and organizing themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One specific way she does this is by having students in her political sociology course create get-out-the-vote strategies, which works exceptionally well every other fall when there is an election.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOftentimes, the way that I have observed them overcoming this supposed paradox is by engaging in institutional politics in ways that are really embedded within the social life here… We have a lot of students who struggle with homelessness and food insecurity. And so, when we do exercises in the classroom, let’s develop a get-out-the-vote campaign! The way they do that is through like social provision.” (Lotesta, <\/strong>11:04<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n

Getting into political sociology by getting out the vote<\/em><\/strong>
Many of today\u2019s students feel apathetic about politics in general, and often feel like their votes do not matter. In our Engaging Elections<\/em> webinar, Johnnie Lotesta discussed a get-out-the-vote activity that she has used in her political sociology classes to educate students about voter apathy and encourage them to develop strategies to help engage others. First, Lotesta spends time discussing the literature on inequalities and democratic participation, pointing out major age and class differences in voting participation. Students reflect on how political opinions are formed, focusing on the socialization of young voters and young activists. Then, Lotesta has students get into small groups and develop get-out-the-vote strategies to try and educate and engage their peers. These strategies are judged by a panel of students, who decide which group\u2019s strategy is the best. This year, these activities will happen at the same time as the elections, which will allow students to watch their efforts play out in real-time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Benjamin Bradlow reminded us that students feel it is easier to organize and become politically engaged if they are aware of the many political organizations and initiatives that can catalyze their interests and ideas. When teaching about climate change and the coalitions at play who are needed to address the problem, Bradlow mentioned that labor unions and workers\u2019 organizations, for instance, are often out of students\u2019 purview but, through class discussions and assignments, become a central actor in understanding the political conflict, and ones that students really coalesce around by the end of the semester.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis issue of \u2018is climate change the issue to be organizing about?\u2019 And something we talk about a lot in the class is the different kinds of social groupings that are involved in this issue, and the kinds of coalitions that are relevant for making change on this issue. And what comes out is the key actor that very few students, if any, bring up at the beginning of the class, but becomes quite central by the end is worker organizations and unions.” (Bradlow, 18:26<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How have you and your students experienced this tension between political apathy and increasing engagement in your school or campus? What other reasons do you see for this phenomenon? Are there ways to improve political engagement among the youth? <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We invite reflections and class notes from our larger community of instructors, teachers, and students to reflect upon these questions and our speakers\u2019 ideas. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From protesting against genocide in Palestine to demanding political responses on climate change, we are witnessing a surge of student activism across campuses. Yet at the same time, many students feel disengaged from politics and apathetic toward the political processes and institutions in the United States. During our Engaging Elections: The Politics of Teaching as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2220,"featured_media":483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"series":[10],"class_list":["post-469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reflections","series-engaging-elections"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/files\/2024\/10\/FP_Webinar-e1728076914890.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2220"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":506,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions\/506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}