About this Public Humanities Project
Luke Elliott-Negri is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at The Graduate Center, CUNY and recipient of the 2020 Public Humanities Fellowship from Humanities New York and the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY for his public humanities project "Human Politics."
Political decisions, good and bad alike, often feel as though they loom over us. Whether legislators are passing innovative state-level environmental regulations or federal agencies are separating children from their parents and locking them in cages, the political actors behind these decisions seem and often are far removed.
This project seeks to humanize and demystify politics, politicians, and political decision-making through short interviews (typically just 10 minutes) with individuals who are, broadly defined, politically active. Some interviews will be with sitting legislators or first-time candidates, others with people who became politically active post-2016 often in very local ways, and everyone in between. The interviews will typically consist of three questions:
- What is your earliest political memory, and in what ways, if any, does it inform your work today?
- What is one aspect of your political activity that once seemed impossible or abstract to you but that is now routine?
- What advice do you have for the politically curious, those who are not particularly active but might want to be?
About Luke Elliott-Negri
Luke Elliott-Negri is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is author of several articles about industrial unionism and social movements and co-author of a policy report on Connecticut’s paid sick days law. His dissertation analyzes the prospects of a contemporary left-wing political party (the Working Families Party) against the backdrop of the literature on American exceptionalism with respect to party formation. His co-authored book about social movement success and failure is under review at Oxford University Press.
This Public Humanities Fellowship and Project is sponsored by Humanities New York and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, through support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
