2020 is a year like we have never witnessed. A pandemic that exposed structural health inequalities was followed by the largest civil rights uprisings in American history against police violence and systemic racism. The sustained demonstrations and radical imagination of protesters have challenged and remade the relationship between government and citizens. Megan Ming Francis will discuss how we got to this urgent moment, the role organized protest can play in the upcoming election, and the future of a fair and robust democracy.
About the speaker
Megan Ming Francis
Associate Professor of Political Science, the University of Washington
Megan Ming Francis is an associate professor of political science at the University of Washington and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School. Francis specializes in the study of American politics, with broad interests in criminal punishment, Black political activism, philanthropy, and the post-civil war South. She is the author of the award winning book, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State. Francis is a proud alumnus of Seattle Public Schools, Rice University in Houston, and Princeton University where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in politics.