Doctoral Dissertation Research: Social Protest, Consensus, and Multicultural Democracy

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Democracies serve heterogeneous constituents, expressing significant variation in social and cultural factors. To ensure peaceful coexistence between different social actors, reaching and preserving consensus is a priority for democratic governments. Although consensus may be pursued on virtually any issue, resource management is a frequent target of democratic policy making, with different implications for different stakeholders. This doctoral dissertation research examines how different social groups—rural communities, urban state bureaucrats, and corporate officials—attempt to reach agreements on complex issues arising from variation in approaches to resource management. Examining how and under what conditions consensus may be reached in a diverse society is essential to understanding how different peoples holding varied worldviews, modes of living, and means of self-expression co-exist. The project supports the training of a U.S.-based graduate student and findings will be broadly disseminated. The researchers will investigate the strategies and narratives employed by culturally distinct groups in pursuit of consensus over resource management policies in a context where officials are making a concerted effort to establish peaceful spaces of deliberation. By bringing together rural and Indigenous leaders, government officials, and company representatives, these spaces of deliberation are an ideal site for examining how different social actors pursue agreement with one another. This research combines in-person and digital qualitative methods to document and analyze the spaces of deliberation in which people from radically different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds endeavor to reach agreements with one another. Through interviews with rural community leaders, residents, and government bureaucrats, the doctoral student will investigate whether and how cultural and socioeconomic differences shape political communication and how consensus is pursued on divisive questions of resource distribution. Findings from this research will illuminate the spectrum of strategies—from deliberation to social protest—that different groups deploy in pursuit of shared political ground while contributing to social science theories about the role consensus plays in democratic politics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.