Like many Americans, I am following the turbulent times our country is facing. It’s hard to ignore the headlines every day, whether they concern containing Covid-19 or the growing political instability. The constant media overload can be exhausting, but it’s important to acknowledge and push past our mental fatigue to make sure that we each perform our important civic duty as citizens of the U.S.: we must focus on the upcoming election and the significance of our vote.

Whichever political party you identify with, the 2020 election is an opportunity to exercise your voice in a way that makes a tangible impact. This is one of the most contentious elections in U.S. history, and college-aged students have the power to influence the election’s outcome.

Americans of ages 18-29 are notoriously known for not voting. According to the United States Census Bureau website, in 2016, 46% of people in this age group voted in comparison to 70% of people over the age of 65. With what’s at stake in this upcoming election—including the climate crisis, access to healthcare, and national security to name a few issues—college-aged students can no longer sit idly by while our parents and grandparents decide the future of both our nation and world.

As an environmental studies major at Tulane, I am concerned about the way the climate crisis will affect the future of our generation. This year, we have seen an increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding. Policies that affect the environment are made on local, state, national, and international levels. Specific to New Orleans and south Louisiana, it’s important that we vote for leaders that will save the Louisiana coastline and save our vulnerable communities from environmental displacement. I acknowledge that this is our world and we are directly responsible for making the changes we want to see.

This year we’ve been able to celebrate the 100th year of a woman’s right to vote. This year we can celebrate five years since gay marriage was legalized throughout the country. But this year we’ve also seen people fight for their basic rights. It is our civic duty to be a voice for people who do not have a voice and to exercise our right to vote. I plan on contributing to positive change by voting. I know that my voice will be heard in doing so. Yours too can and will be heard through the action of voting.

Whether you vote by mail, early, or at the polls on November 3rd, I urge you all to participate in this very important election.

For more information on voting, visit www.vote.org.

As the U.S. approaches Election Day on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, Americans face a campaign unlike any they have seen in recent memory. Not in a century have Americans been asked to vote amid a global health pandemic, and the unique context of the 2020 campaign means voters will have a lot to consider as they prepare to cast ballots.

Of course Americans will not cast ballots only on November 3^rd—many states have implemented forms of convenience voting that expand the period in which voters make up their minds and select their preferred candidates. Convenience voting takes many forms: in-person early voting, no-excuse absentee balloting, and all-mail elections. All told, 42 states and the District of Columbia offer voters a means of casting a ballot before Election Day.

There is significant scholarly interest in the impact of convenience voting on individual voting behavior and aggregate election outcomes. My own research suggests that the implementation of early and convenience voting systems does not, by itself, increase turnout, though convenience voting coupled with candidate and party mobilization can increase turnout. This position echoes a study by J. Eric Oliver suggesting voters are two percent more likely to vote when the availability of convenience voting is coupled with mobilization efforts. All-mail elections can also produce an increase in voter turnout, though the effect varies by type of election.

A great many states have adjusted their voting methods to account for the COVID-19 pandemic. These temporary changes are often justified as helping to reduce in-person voting and the subsequent possibility of virus transmission as voters wait in line. But these changes are not without controversy; critics argue that expanded absentee/mail balloting will not only challenge the ability of elections officials to count votes in a timely manner but also increase opportunities for election fraud. However, the evidence that absentee/mail ballots are characterized by fraud is astonishingly small. Using data collected by The Heritage Foundation, researchers found only 44 cases of voter fraud in recent elections out of nearly 50 million ballots cast.

Regardless of when and how Americans vote, one thing is nearly certain: once the polls close on November 3^rd, we will still be in for a very long evening. Recent presidential elections have not been called until 2:30 a.m. Wednesday (2016), 2:00 p.m. Wednesday (2004), and 36 days later (2000). With high levels of interest in the 2020 election and a likely surge in absentee/mail ballots that will have to be counted alongside Election Day votes, Americans may go to sleep on November 3^rd without yet knowing who will be president come January 20, 2021.

Climate change, social inequalities, inclusive diversity, restorative justice—today’s urgent issues form the foundation of the School of Liberal Arts Young Public Scholars Summer Program. Developed for rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors in high school, Young Public Scholars offers a dedicated space for students to learn more about today’s pressing issues, their historical roots, and the most current frameworks for researching them to equip students with a new toolset for creating transformative change.

In Summer 2020, the Young Public Scholars Program offered two courses: “Punishment and Redemption from the Industrial Prison Complex” and “Environmental Justice in Anthropocene,” taught by Betsy Weiss and Edward “Ned” Randolph, respectively, both visiting professors in the School of Liberal Arts. Students from Chicago to Palo Alto and New Orleans gathered online for two-week sessions on these special topics.

Discussing the important ties of environment and our everyday actions, Randolph met with students three times a week for the duration of his course. In between meetings, students watched documentaries, immersed themselves in pivotal readings, and crafted presentations. “These courses are a lot of work in a very short amount of time,” explained Randolph. “It was clear that the students were introspective, open-minded, and self-motivated. Each was eager to deepen their understanding of the many layers of environmental change and put their knowledge to practice.” This dedication echoed through the critical conversations in Weiss’ class, as well. Together with Weiss and guest lecturers, students discussed the broad social impacts of a justice system rooted in inequalities. Weiss’ students met online with a local formerly incarcerated activist and businesswoman and studied the structures for incarceration through film, video, and reportage.

In both courses, students shared their acquired knowledge on public platforms, leaving the program with new additions to their digital portfolio. While Randolph’s students created a website for the students’ op-eds, participants in both Randolph and Weiss’ courses contributed their work to ViaNolaVie.org, an online culture magazine founded by New Orleans journalists and artists that reaches more than 3,000 weekly readers. This partnership will continue for the 2021 program.

Applications for the School of Liberal Arts Young Public Scholars Summer Program for 2021 open on October 30. For more information, visit https://summer.tulane.edu/programs/young-public-scholars.

Digital technologies have reshaped the public sphere. For many, the growth of social media raises questions about how these technologies might change, even destroy, the nature of democracy itself. Particularly in the years since the 2016 presidential election, critics point out that digital platforms like Twitter and Reddit can often be unwelcoming—even hostile—to diverse perspectives, while platforms like Facebook can become host to misinformation campaigns. Concerns over the harms of social media were also highlighted in debates over how to regulate the misogynist and racist quality of some online message boards on campuses across the U.S.

Though such concerns are valid, they are also tempered by recognition of digital technology’s creative power. By lowering the cost of entry, digital spaces have also enabled historically marginalized groups to participate more effectively in public discourse. Pointing to movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, proponents argue that digital technologies provide new ways for individuals to build communities, to share information and resources, and to access these resources with greater speed and across wider geographical boundaries. In fact, a recent Pew study found that 67% of Americans consider social media platforms to be important for creating movements for social change.

All told, both the toxic and creative realities of digital technologies suggest an unavoidable truth: from Twitter to Facebook, through #hashtags or hacktivism, our politics are going online. The question for scholars, citizens, and activists alike isn’t whether or not this shift in our political environment is good or bad. Like any tool, the utility of digital technologies depends on how we wield them. And that, in turn, depends on the practice of citizenship, broadly conceived. How do we cultivate the underlying habits of civic engagement—cooperation, respect, and a willingness to consider the circumstances of others—without which democracy is impossible? These are habits we ought to expect not only of the leaders we elect, but of ourselves as well.

We can’t look to digital technologies to ‘fix’ our democracy any more than we can blame them for ‘breaking’ it. Instead, the efficacy of democracy depends on how we practice it together as members of a common political community. As we look toward the upcoming election, and plan for its results, Americans must carefully consider the work required by and for democracy. In doing so, they might reflect upon the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “the only title in our democracy superior to that of President is the title of citizen.”

Staffing the federal judiciary was already going to be an issue in the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump, replicating and reinforcing a successful strategy from his 2016 campaign, released his new Supreme Court pool of potential nominees in early September 2020. Building from judges he had previously appointed to lower federal courts and adding to lists last updated in November 2017, Trump was continuing to assure Republicans that his administration was committed to appointing judges with strong conservative credentials. This was all before the passing of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on September 18, 2020.

To call this a critical vacancy on the High Court seems an understatement. Justice Ginsburg was the core of the Court’s liberal bloc, a four-member group of justices all appointed by Democratic presidents. By attracting the votes of conservative colleagues, at times in narrowly crafted opinions and often in narrowly decided cases, that liberal bloc had preserved key precedents in the areas of reproductive rights, race and affirmative action, executive powers, and the operation of administrative agencies. The median or swing justice on the Roberts Court was Chief Justice John Roberts himself—a conservative appointed by George W. Bush, but a jurist also concerned with his institution’s legitimacy and independence. The five justices of the conservative bloc included two recently appointed by President Trump, making the Roberts bench one already dominated by GOP nominees.

Though Chief Justice Roberts famously decried his Court’s politicization, stating in 2019 that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges,” the reality of presidential staffing of the federal courts is decidedly political. Supreme Court vacancies represent opportunities to influence legal policy making. And while Supreme Court justices are not agents of either presidents or parties, their ideology is part of their qualification and credential for selection. Judicial ideology is a complex and controversial concept—whether it includes overt policy preferences or approaches to constitutional interpretation is a matter of debate among political scientists and legal scholars. But presidents and their staff, and senators and their majority leaders, certainly behave as if nominee screening and nominee selection has significant consequences for judicial behavior, case outcomes, and the development of the law.

How the electorate sees the Court varies, and how voters in this year’s presidential contest will assess the appointment of Ginsburg’s successor as an election issue remains to be seen. Confirmation of that successor just weeks or even days before Election Day 2020 may energize some voters and dispirit others. But what has clearly unfolded since mid-September is the partisan power politics of the modern judicial nomination and confirmation process. It is a process less governed by a separation of powers than by a “separation of parties” dynamic. With a co-partisan and cooperative senate, a president truly can ‘pack the courts.’ As we approach November 3rd, one thing is sure: elections most certainly do have consequences for the composition of the federal judiciary—whether the Court and its prospective nominees are on the ballot with the presidential candidate, or not.

Five weeks after starting his Fulbright English Teaching Assistant position in Brazil, Nicolas Javier Lopez Casertano had to return home to Washington D.C. It was March 2020, and the rapid spread of Covid-19 was being felt worldwide. Suddenly, Lopez became one of the many Fulbright fellows returning home with no plans for the upcoming year.

Deans across Tulane took note of this devastating outcome and responded quickly by developing the Tulane University 2020 Peace Corps and Fulbright Initiative, which offered scholarships and incentives for students returning from their host countries to enroll in the university’s graduate programs. According to James Huck, the graduate advisor for the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, seven new master’s students were admitted to the Latin American Studies Program through the initiative. “These students are very organized and driven, and we’re confident they will create a dynamism in our program and at Tulane,” explained Huck. “Because the students are coming from Peace Corps and Fulbright fellowships, most of them are very interested in linguistics and development issues, as well as issues of race and ethnicity. And all of the students have an abiding interest in studying more about their host countries.”

Huck’s description aligns with the reasons many students chose to apply to the Latin American Studies Program within the School of Liberal Arts, including Lopez. “Tulane is very well regarded for Latin Americanists, but I was also drawn to the Mayan Language Institute and the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship,” said Lopez. During his time at Tulane, Lopez hopes to continue reflecting on what he learned and experienced during his short time in Brazil, while also incorporating his other research interests in linguistics, immigration, and community organizing. He looks forward to studying with esteemed faculty such as Judith Maxwell, a professor in the Department of Anthropology who also teaches in the Mayan Language Institute. “My family is from a small town in Guatemala that experienced the genocide against indigenous peoples in the 70s and 80s. I left Guatemala when I was young, so it’s important for me to continue learning about this history and the languages of the area so I can communicate with my family and the community,” explained Lopez. Understanding the region’s history opens doors to examining the disparities within and across Latin American countries and the U.S. “I want to build a portfolio of my own ideas that can help shape the future of these countries, and I’m thankful that Tulane created an opportunity for me to do so when I was no longer able to teach and study in Brazil.”

Huck explains that for many of these students, like Lopez, their work reaches far beyond the academic setting. “The Fulbright and Peace Corps students are excelling academically and involved in community engagement—two pillars of an education we uphold at Tulane. Because of this, many of the students are also interested in translating the community involvement they were planning abroad, to New Orleans.” For Lopez, this means spending his free time in New Orleans learning more about immigrant populations and, hopefully, applying his previous work in humanitarian organizing.

In August of 1791, after a more than decade-long war, African and African descendant slaves in the colony of Saint Domingue revolted against their French colonial rulers, becoming the first nation in the Atlantic World to permanently ban slavery. Their revolt-turned-revolution eventually created the independent nation of Haiti, which was ruled by nonwhites and formerly enslaved individuals. But what can an uprising on a Caribbean island in the 1800s teach us today? Jesús Ruiz (Ph.D. ’20) is committed to investigating this question by highlighting the importance of the Haitian Revolution. “There is a very deep tradition of liberation that comes out of the Haitian Revolution, not just for them as a country, but for the broader Americas and beyond. I believe it's the most important revolution in the Western Hemisphere during the Age of Revolutions,” said Ruiz.

A School of Liberal Arts doctoral alum from the Latin American Studies Program, Ruiz is inspired by both revolutions around the world and Haiti’s presence in New Orleans. As he began diving into the political history of the Haitian Revolution, he quickly realized that the majority of the history had been recorded from Anglo- and French-centric perspectives. Determined to write the history of the Haitian Revolution from a Spanish and West African perspective, Ruiz has conducted research at archives in Spain, France, and Haiti with support of notable programs and organizations such as the Fulbright Institute of International Education and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In summer 2020, Ruiz was awarded the prestigious American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Emerging Voices Fellowship to continue his scholarship.

Through his ACLS Fellowship, Ruiz is working with the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, one of the premier destinations for Haitian historians. Throughout this fellowship, Ruiz will be teaching history and digital humanities courses at Duke, working with other professors and professionals in his field through mentorship, and developing his research into additional articles and a book. Tackling a new endeavor, Ruiz will also be learning more about how to share this history digitally.

“The Haitian Revolution is the first ever successful slave revolt-turned-revolution-turned-independent nation-state in the world, and this revolt inspired slave revolts and liberation movements all over the world,” said Ruiz. He points to the fact that Haiti gained independence by emancipating enslaved individuals in 1804, a process that was not mirrored by France until 1848, the U.S. in 1865, and Brazil in 1888. “Even through we’re looking at the 1800s, this history is just as important now as we continue to support ‘history from below,’ as historians of the oppressed say,” explained Ruiz.

Ruiz believes uncovering more complex aspects about the political history of the Haitian Revolution will be empowering for those individuals whose stories have been silenced in the region and around the world. He sees his focus on the digital humanities as an important aspect of this process—increasing digital archives in Haiti can grant access to many historical records that currently remain in colonizing countries, such as Spain and France. “Understanding Haiti’s history, understanding how individuals came together to create a truly free nation, can help us continue the push toward black liberation, especially in moments like we see in our country today,” explained Ruiz.

"The Coronation of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, first Emperor of Haiti," from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Image provided by Jesús Ruiz.

“General Revolt of the Blacks, massacre of the whites," from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Image provided by Jesús Ruiz.

Two years ago, School of Liberal Arts alumna Octavia Abell (SLA ’14) and Kyleigh Russ founded Govern for America (GFA), an organization that connects young professionals with jobs in the public sector through a two-year fellowship program. In Spring 2020, Forbes celebrated Abell and Russ in their 30 Under 30 feature, praising GFA’s work in local governments and emphasizing another tenant of the organization—diversifying the field so that governments reflect the diversity of America.

GFA welcomed their second cohort of fellows from ten different states in June 2020. These young leaders recently graduated from 12 colleges across the country and are now working in five government agencies, including Tulane alumnus Evan Doomes (PHTM ’20). Doomes majored in political science and public health, prompting GFA to match him with the Louisiana Department of Health in the Bureau of Vital Records and Statistics. After going through the state’s regular hiring practice, Doomes began his work of critical analysis this summer, merging his interests in health and policy. “My work in the Bureau of Vital Records asks me to collect information on who is dying, from the deceased’s location to specific demographic information, and also the same for births, such as where babies are being born and what the outcomes are for mothers,” said Doomes. “From these statistics, we can better understand how these instances relate to issues such as inequities in healthcare and the environment. It all starts with knowing the data.”   

During his senior year at Tulane, Doomes connected with Liberal Arts alumna and GFA Fellow Julia DeSimone (SLA ’19) to inquire further about GFA. DeSimone studied political science and social policy and practice at Tulane and pursued her interest in education working with organizations such as the Recovery School District and Enroll NOLA while in New Orleans. Now, she is in her second year of her GFA Fellowship at the Louisiana Department of Education in Baton Rouge. Together with her colleagues, DeSimone analyzes state and federal funds for Louisiana’s school districts and develops applications that allow districts to easily apply for funding, and for the state to gather all necessary information for distributing those funds. DeSimone sees her work at the state level as a vital connector of nationwide issues and initiatives for each student. “There is a lot of change that can happen at the state level that directly impacts our communities, and I’m happy to be a part of that change as a woman and young person,” said DeSimone.

While Doomes and DeSimone work with different state agencies, they both feel a bond as GFA Fellows. Cultivated through the organization’s Summer Institute and ongoing programming, the GFA Fellows’ connection has been instrumental to their success in and enjoyment of their positions, particularly at a time when many are working from home due to Covid-19. Through these programs, mentoring, and training, GFA brings together professionals with these recent grads to discuss topics ranging from equity to resume-building. “We’re building a network of leaders committed to amplifying the voices of marginalized populations and centering racial justice in government work,” said Abell. “GFA Fellows like Evan and Julia are emblematic of these values.”