Provost’s Lecture on Diversity

On Wednesday, April 24^th, Jamila Michener, Associate Professor and Inaugural Director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures at Cornell University and the 2023-24 Provost’s Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow, delivered The Provost’s Lecture on Diversity: Power from the Margins and the Promise of Democracy. Pundits, scholars and ordinary people alike lament the troubling decline of democracy in the contemporary United States. Trust in democratic institutions is at a nadir while political cynicism and support for authoritarianism are on the rise. In this broader context of political malaise, where are the avenues for building a more robust democratic polity? Drawing on insights from qualitative research, Dr. Michener highlighted how building power within racially and economically marginalized communities around issues directly related to their material interests (like health and housing) is a promising pathway. Grassroots political organizing is (perhaps unexpectedly) an antidote to the social cleavages that accelerate democratic backsliding. What’s more is that such organizing can forge a route to transforming both the polity and the political economy it is embedded within such that both are more attuned to communities that teeter at the margins of the existing power structures.