TOPICS: DEMOCRACY LAB: DERADICALIZATION in Fall 2021 (LW3091B)

In discussing the “democratic ideal” of education, John Dewey emphasized two traits that link the educational experience and democracy. The aim of education, he argued, is to “generate greater reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests” and “continuous readjustment through meeting new situations.” Building from this observation, the Democracy Lab combines Dewey’s insights into education and democracy with recent trends in design-thinking pedagogy. The course focuses on generating opportunities for students to build a mutual interest based on their differences and provide a context for them to deploy this mutual interest toward solving a specific problem. To this end, the Democracy Lab will explore a key challenge to our contemporary democracy. This semester’s topic is deradicalization.

Radicalization and polarization have come to define social action and mobilization across Europe, Asia, 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 AUP’s 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. Our Democracy Lab explores this question in very concrete terms. It provides a hands-on, design-thinking, experimental space