Campus activism across the spectrum. Amy Binder, Johns Hopkins University

Over the last few months, students on college campuses all over the world have been protesting the mass slaughter in Gaza. I was one of the majority of faculty at UMass Amherst who supported our students’ encampment, and then opposed our administration’s violent assault on it. In this episode I talk with Amy Binder, whose book with Jeffrey Kidder, The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today (2022) is one of the few analyses of student activism on U.S. college campuses after 2016. Their study is based in flagship state schools like mine, and is unusual in its inclusion of student activists across the political spectrum. This conversation was a much needed opportunity to reflect on the events of last year.

Amy Binder is a Stavros Niarchos Agora Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She is Interim Director of the SNF Agora Institute, founded in 2017 to diagnose the problems facing liberal democracies, encourage dialogue and participation through public events, and to offer courses in the study of democracy. Before her recent move to Johns Hopkins, Amy was on the sociology faculty at the University of California San Diego.

Please join me at the invited thematic session at ASA in Montreal next week, Sociology for Hope. The panelists represent a range of substantive interests and career stages, from graduate student to emeritus faculty.