I (Kate) was reminded of this vital truth in the spring of 2023 in Istanbul, where I was doing research for my dissertation on Turkey’s military coup d’état of 1980 and the junta’s subsequent repression of trade unionists and leftists. Shortly before I arrived, the country experienced a major earthquake. With a high-stakes national election scheduled later in the year, people began to speak openly about the possibility that the ruling party of the past two decades might be ousted. If they were, the space for political change might be larger than it had been in a long time.

Sitting with some friends at a café one evening, I made a comment about how a victory for the ruling party would foreclose this political opening. A friend who worked there advocating for women’s rights shot me a stern look. “No matter the political regime, there is always room to maneuver. Nearly every week my colleagues and I are in Ankara persuading parliamentarians to support measures that will improve women’s lives.” She continued more thoughtfully, “you can always contest. Sometimes there is just more space than others.”

Fast-forward to 2025-26: I found my friend's words echoing through the work of Brown faculty, staff, and students working at the cutting edge of democratic engagement. They resonated with a paper Adi Ophir, Visiting Professor of Humanities and Middle East Studies, gave in February 2025 at the Cogut Institute’s Political Concepts conference on “democratization.” He argued that regardless of whether a country is a democracy, there are always ways for people to contest political power to more equitably share it. While terms like authoritarianism and fascism describe very real and sometimes overwhelming realities, their uncritical use can trick us into thinking the fight for political power has already been ceded when it has not, foreclosing our collective political imagination and potential to bring about different configurations of political power.

In the classroom and the community 

This idea also resonated with students’ final projects for Professor Deva Woodly’s class, POLS 1365: 21^st Century Social Movements, in Spring 2026, many of them experiments in seeding different kinds of democratic practice. Students explored both theoretical and case-based studies of collective mobilization in the United States and abroad to assess the political and policy impact of social movements. The course was one of many offered as part of the Brown 2026 Curriculum, an interdisciplinary initiative that highlights courses exploring the American Revolution, its legacies and the relationship between universities and democracy. 

Professor Woodly has been thinking about the vital connection between social movements and democracy for over a decade. Her first book, The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (Oxford 2015), argued that the way social movements communicate with the general public matters for their chance of lasting success. Her second book, Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements (Oxford 2021), examined how social movements are themselves important institutions for the health and survival of democracy. Centering the perspectives and meaning-making of ordinary citizens, Woodly attends to how public discussion shapes the political meanings of social and economic issues and how, in turn, these understandings transform democratic practice and public policy.  

It was this perspective she encouraged students to explore in their final projects for the course. Exploring a range of issues and taking diverse forms, the projects sought to nurture other (political) imaginations of how we might negotiate collective life. They included:

• Levi Kim ‘29 organized a new student group at Brown called TRANSformation that stands up for trans and gender-diverse rights. In April, the group held a rally in front of the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library to raise awareness and visibility about transgender rights and the rise in anti-trans violence. 
• Sadie Bell ‘28 and Siona Lewis-Coffey ‘29, wrote and directed a short documentary film entitled “Providence Our Home,” examining how the dramatic increase in housing costs over the last five years has changed peoples’ sense of belonging to the city.
• Ava Stryker-Robbins ‘28 produced a podcast exploring “narrative power” in abolition versus reform advocacy regarding the criminal justice system in the United States.
• To increase a sense of positive connection among members of the Brown community and foster resilience, Dasha Dmitrieva ‘27 started a social media initiative called Good News @ Brown that highlights positive news (“anything big or small that brought you joy” or “things that made you feel more connected to your community”) people submit through an anonymous form. 

Participation is essential to democracy. For student leaders of Brown Votes – the university’s nonpartisan, campus-wide voter engagement and mobilization initiative housed within the Swearer Center – the biggest focus this semester is a concerted push to boost voter turnout for eligible voters in the upcoming elections: In the 2022 midterms, turnout of all eligible voters on Brown’s campus came in at just 32.1%.

Though faculty and staff may imagine students are already plugged in to information and opportunities for civic engagement, often that is not the case. Faculty and staff have an important role to play in activating students’ sense of civic engagement, and Brown Votes is poised to support faculty and staff in that work, says Rosie Shultz ‘27, Brown Votes’ Civic Engagement Fellow for Communications.

“Democracy works best as a verb.” says Shultz, who also took Woodly’s class last spring, and whose final project, a large textile called “tattered,” received national recognition this month as a winner of The Future of Democracy Prize. “Through Brown Votes, our team works to reach students across campus, while motivating them towards continued civic engagement practices—election year or not.”

Here are four key ways Shultz says faculty and staff can support students ahead of midterm elections:

• Click on this Google Form to invite a Brown Votes leader to come and speak to your class with a 2-4 minute presentation on How to Vote at Brown.
• Ahead of National Voter Registration Day on 9/15, download this graphic and add it to your class slide deck, departmental newsletter or digital kiosk to promote Brown Votes’ tabling event on the Main Green.
• Direct students to Turbovote to sign up to receive election reminders, get registered to vote, or apply for an absentee ballot.
• Go to Brown Votes’ Civic Engagement Toolkit, which outlines ways faculty, staff, and students can promote nonpartisan civic engagement, including participation in elections and understanding of public issues, that meet the University’s Political Activity Policy

Other resources you may find valuable include:

• American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ Preparing Students for Civic Life: A Guide for Higher Education Leaders and Summer 2026 open-access issue of Daedalus: How Do We Renovate American Democracy at the 250th?
• Campus Compact’s Practicing Democracy: A Toolkit for Educating Civic Professionals by Nicholas V. Longo
• Civic Engagement and Voting Rights course syllabi and assignments, supported by a Mellon grant at Clemson
• Democratic Erosion Consortium - a nonpartisan, collaborative effort to address the global challenge of democratic erosion through research, teaching, and multi-stakeholder collaboration (co-founded and co-directed by Robert Blair, Arkadij Eisler Goldman Sachs Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs)
• Everyday Democracy’s Our Next 250 Toolkit - a guide to hosting community gatherings about civic imagination and democracy 
• Higher Education Democracy Exchange - a digital platform for sharing resources and data and building community, developed by a partnership of organizations (Campus Compact, AAC&U, More Perfect & Karsh Institute of Democracy) committed to advancing robust civic engagement and a thriving democracy
• Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Case Studies on Democracy
• National Civic League’s Healthy Democracy Ecosystem Map (searchable by state, and anyone can submit suggested edits or additions)