Brandon Davis, Political Science
Recent elections have shown that political organizations still matter. The Civil and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960’s made racially exclusionary practices illegal; nevertheless, they did not automatically enforce rights. Whites subsequently adapted and deployed new methods of political exclusion. The contemporary social and political context is different, but the ambiguity and indeterminacy of voting rights are not. State voter ID laws, limits on early voting, restrictions on registration, voter roll purges, disenfranchisement, and gerrymandering have become ordinary yet systemic barriers to minority participation.
Voting rights are again being challenged and new de jure and de facto voter suppression techniques are again on the rise. Yet so too are the number of political organizations attempting to build, sustain, and employ the strategic capacity necessary for successful legal mobilization.
Understanding how the Alabama Democratic Conference developed, sustained, and employed statewide strategic capacity and effectively capitalized on the support structure for legal mobilization for over twenty years will inform our understanding of social movement theory and provide insights that can be adapted to fit the needs of rights advocacy groups across the United States and in other western-style democracies.
This research project will create a repository of research materials on minority political organizations and their legal campaigns. A short documentary will be created and disseminated to a wide audience, from local to national civic and political organizations and from secondary schools to graduate seminars.
Lastly, this research project will incorporate underrepresented students at all stages of the research, increasing their sense of belonging, which is highly correlated with academic outcomes, and imparting research and job readiness skills.
The fundamental impact of this CAREER award will be the scientific study of the use of law to enforce voting rights, which is exceedingly relevant today. The PI will create a research repository of material more comprehensive than what is currently available on political organizations and their legal campaigns.
The material collected will allow researchers to study the founding, development, and organization of a statewide political organization, providing a map of events and histories across the state. It will include detailed descriptions of how the organization was created and organized, made decisions respective of a diverse constituency, acquired resources, chose legal battles and plaintiffs, framed arguments, chose candidates, and won electoral victories, many of which included women, successfully contested racialized redistricting, and promoted enfranchisement through the questions asked of the actual organization members who deliberated and made these decisions.
In addition, students will record online trainings on research methods and write a standard operating procedures manual, documenting best practices. A short documentary will be disseminated to a wide audience, from local to national civic and political organizations and from secondary schools to graduate seminars.
Lastly, this CAREER project will incorporate underrepresented students increasing their sense of belonging, which is highly correlated with academic outcomes and impart research skills and workforce development, job readiness skills
Time, eligibility, and other details
| Expected workload | Transcribing – Max – 20 hours a week. Work at your own pace. In addition, there will opportunities to travel to Alabama to help conduct interviews. |
| Skills required | Word, Excel, and/or Film & Digital Media |
| Who is eligible | Open to all (including Film & Digital Media Students) |
| Core partners | NSF |
| Sponsoring party | Faculty Project – NSF |
| Volunteer, Paid, or Credit-eligible? | PAID |
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