Jennifer Forestal, Ph.D.
jforestal@luc.edu
Assistant Professor
Loyola University Chicago
I am the Helen Houlahan Rigali Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. My research focuses on democratic theory--in particular, the consequences of digital technologies for democratic practices. My book Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) explores how the design of the built environment informs how, and whether, citizens engage in democratic practices and outlines three necessary architectural characteristics for democratic digital spaces. With Menaka Philips, I co-edited The Wives of Western Philosophy: Gender Politics and Intellectual Labor (Routledge, 2021) which examines the role of wives and intimate partners in constructing the political theory canon.
Research Interests
Political Theory
Information Technology
Democratic Theory
Social Media
Civic Engagement
Deliberative democracy requires both equality and difference, with structures that organize a cohesive public while still accommodating the unique perspectives of each participant. While institutions like laws and norms can help to provide this balance, the built environment also plays a role supporting democratic politics—both on- and off-line. In this article, I use the work of Hannah Arendt to articulate two characteristics the built environment needs to support democratic politics: it must (1) serves as a common world, drawing users together and emphasizing their common interests and must also (2) preserve spaces of appearance, accommodating diverse perspectives and inviting disagreement. I, then, turn to the example of Facebook to show how these characteristics can be used as criteria for evaluating how well a particular digital platform supports democratic politics and providing alternative mechanisms these sites might use to fulfill their role as a public realm.
While there is disagreement as to the severity of the digital disinformation problem, scholars and practitioners have largely coalesced around the idea that ‘a new system of safeguards is needed’ to prevent its spread. By minimizing the role of citizens in managing their own communities, however, I argue these gatekeeping approaches are undemocratic. To develop a more democratic alternative, I draw from the work of Harold D. Lasswell and John Dewey to argue that we should study the organization of digital publics. For citizens to engage in democratic inquiry, publics must be organized so that they can 1) easily identify their common interests and 2) regularly encounter variety. I then analyze Facebook, showing how the News Feed and Facebook Groups together create a platform on which propagandists can effectively target and manipulate specific publics. I conclude by turning to Reddit to suggest alternative forms of organizing digital publics more democratically.
Johnson (2017) conceptualizes the social responsibilities of digital media platforms by describing two ethical approaches: one emphasizing the discursive freedom of platform-users, the other emphasizing protecting users from harmful posts. These competing concerns are on full display in the current debate over platforms’ obligations during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Johnson argues both approaches are grounded in democracy, we argue that democratic commitments transcend the freedom/ harm dichotomy. Instead, a commitment to democracy points toward social media companies’ responsibilities to structure their platforms in ways that facilitate perspectival diversity and collective deliberation.
Experiential learning has been shown to help cultivate habits of effective democratic citizens, but it is often seen as infeasible for large classes. This need not be the case. In this paper, we describe a group project designed to introduce students in a 70-person Introduction to Politics course to the basic political processes of local government. In addition to guidance on how to implement the project, we also discuss survey data from students in the class to compare pre- and post-tests for each semester as well as comparing post-tests across two semesters. We explore how students who were enrolled in the course responded to the experiential learning component of the course on three separate dimensions: cognitive development, community awareness, and self-understanding. Ultimately, students reported that they felt civically engaged because they worked directly with community partners who they felt benefited from their involvement (community awareness) and they developed their skills for teamwork and collaboration (self-understanding). Our evaluation suggests that this group-level experiential learning project in a large course can be an effective tool for political science education as well as student development and implementing these kinds of experiential learning interventions can improve with each iteration of the project. Additionally, in light of student feedback, we provide suggestions on how other faculty members teaching large courses could incorporate this project into their own pedagogical practice.
Structured in-class debates are a valuable addition to courses that seek to foster students’ development as citizens. In this study, we examine how different debate formats can impact their effectiveness as a pedagogical tool for advancing students’ civic learning outcomes. We consider moderated dualistic debates that ask students to bring empirical evidence to bear on a yes/no question about a particular policy issue and unmoderated pluralistic debates that ask students to engage with multiple perspectives about essential political values. We find that both debate formats contribute to students’ civic education: Moderated dualistic debates cultivated some political skills while unmoderated pluralistic debates deepened—and complicated—students’ thinking about democratic values. From these results, we conclude that students’ civic development benefits from experience with a variety of different debate formats that can prepare students for effective citizenship in distinct ways.
The increased use of anonymous digital platforms raises substantive concerns about accountability in digital spaces. However, contemporary evaluations of anonymity focus too narrowly on its protective function: its ability to protect a diversity of speakers and ideas. Drawing on two examples of anonymous political engagements – Publius’s writing of the Federalist Papers and college students’ use of the social media platform Yik Yak – we develop an account of anonymity’s associational function: the processes by which people generate and negotiate collective identities, discussions, and actions in wider publics. As we argue, anonymity’s associational function can (1) generate conditions under which individuals develop collective interests and identities to foster collective action, and (2) enable novel interactions between these individuals and communities and the larger publics of which they are part. We conclude with a discussion of how attention to associational anonymity can contribute to a more nuanced account of democracy in practice.
This study focuses on examining the role that isolated extracurricular events can play in furthering students’ civic education; these one-time events require fewer resources to implement than courses and therefore provide valuable opportunities for faculty to engage new audiences on their campuses in the work of civic learning. In order to develop more effective civic learning in these isolated extracurricular activities, we follow a two-pronged approach. First, we use survey data to determine the audiences reached by extracurricular civic education events, as well as to assess event attendees’ levels of political knowledge, civic skills, democratic values, and feelings of efficacy. Second, we use insights drawn from this data to suggest strategies to design more effective programming, including identifying key audiences and targeting specific learning outcomes, and share the successful results we have had in implementing these strategies on our campus. In so doing, our work not only adds to the growing literature on civic learning, but also provides a model for how to practically organize successful, and manageable, one-time extracurricular civic education programs.
Introducing a themed symposia issue of Hypatia, which aims at recovering the contributions of the wives and partners of canonical figures in western political thought.
The problem of trolls exemplifies the challenges of building democratic communities in the digital environment of social media. Distinguishing trolls from activists can be difficult; democratic theorists have yet to adequately address how to prevent the former while remaining open to the latter. In this article, I outline a theory of democratic politics that takes space as a central element in shaping democratic interactions. Using the work of John Dewey, I draw out two key characteristics of democratic space: boundedness and flexibility. Using these criteria, I then evaluate Kinja, Gawker Media's commenting platform, both before and after trolls attacked the site in 2014. I find that in altering its boundaries to successfully protect against trolls, Kinja introduced a new problem: a lack of flexibility that continues to affect the possibility for democratic discourse on the platform. I conclude by suggesting how this theory of democratic space might shape future research.
Book Review of Siva Vaidhyanathan's Antisocial Media
'Hamilton' asks us "Who tells your story?" The answer, we suggest, is "wives." We place the figure of Eliza Hamilton into historical context, calling attention to the many unsung labors of wives throughout history.
‘Don’t feed the trolls’, people on social media are told. By forcing people to use their real names online, the managers of online forums hope to shame trolls into silence. But, Jennifer Forestal argues, this fails to tackle the root of the problem: a lack of the ‘close and direct intercourse and attachment’ which John Dewey believed was vital to democratic deliberation. We need to design online spaces where this can happen, rather than indiscriminately multiplying our connections and relying on top-down moderation. Some disruption is necessary when we talk about politics.
Drawing from theorists of democracy like Dewey and Mill, we suggest that the divisive and offensive rhetoric on social media are evidence of a breakdown in democratic practices of accountability between citizens, practices that are crucial to the health and longevity of democracy. We also highlight examples of social media users addressing that breakdown, and how this should be supported in traditional political spaces. (with Menaka Philips, Tulane)
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