Talking Politics

  (By Sarah Adams) The Talking Politics event on Friday May 19, 2023, featured a semi-formal conversation between Joshua Babcock and Ilana Gershon. They focused on how the state ignores its citizens in the context of U.S. school boards, analyzing this not as a breakdown but as a design feature of democratic governance. As Babcock and Gershon argued, the U.S. school board is a productive site for looking at the ways the state ignores precisely because it isn’t something that fades into the background: instead, there is endless talk about how ignoring happens, why it happens, and what else might or must be done . In the talk, the pair did not look at specific political perspectives or issues raised by speakers. Instead, they considered participant structures. These include things like the role relationships between school board members and members of the public; the different opportunities for speaking that get allocated to external experts, to board members, and to members of the ...