Introducing Season Seven

We welcome a new guest host and unveil our theme for S7: “the art of democracy.”

As we’ll explore this season, democracy is not just a set of institutions and rules and votes. It’s an art. And graffiti is perhaps is the most democratic artform. This mural adorns a wall in the Wynwood district of Miami, as depicted in a photo taken on Aug. 29, 2014.

Maria Kraynova / 123RF

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S7 Trailer. Introducing Season Seven

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New season, new questions, new people! This fall, UVa historian Emily Burrill joins our team to fill in for Will while he’s away. Emily chats with Siva and Will about what’s coming up in Season Seven. We’ll be delving into the relationship between expressive culture and democratic practice, putting on a couple of live shows and — of course — serving up our bread and butter: the knowledge you need to help save the rule of the people.

Near the end of September, D in D will be at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin for a live show on economic inequality and the failures of the American Dream. Joining us there: guests Alissa Quart, author of Bootstrapped, and David Leonhardt, a New York Times columnist. And in October, we’ll be doing a live event on our home turf, in Charlottesville, Va., for the Karsh Institute’s Democracy360. In partnership with The Atlantic, this multi-day event will bring luminaries from around the country to discuss the future of the democratic experiment in the United States.

Meet

Emily Burrill

Emily Burrill is an associate professor in the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History, and an affiliate of the Karsh Institute. She studies the intersections among colonialism, law, gender and sexuality in West Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. Burrill previously taught at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, where she directed the African Studies Center. Her book States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali (2015, Ohio University Press) won the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize for French colonial history. Follow Burrill on Twitter @EmilySBurrill.

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In her scholarship, Burrill has pored over court records on domestic abuse in 1930s Sikasso as well as letters about gender and slavery exchanged between French officials and West African traders in the 1890s.

States of Marriage considered how French Sudan — today, Mali — used the institution of marriage to constitute its colonial subjects.

Burrill’s work helps shed light on present-day challenges as well, an issue she takes up with colleagues in the 2010 edited volume Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa.

More recently, she helped collect scholarship on the nexus between sexual justice and discourses about human rights on the continent.

Burrill is also interested in the intersection of technology and historiographic methodology, especially the digitization and analysis of archival photographs.

Learn

Senegalese activists rally in New York to protest the leadership of President Macky Sall on Times Square, on July 2, 2022.

Lev Radin / Shutterstock

Besides just being a delightful, incisive scholar, she’s going to help us bring a sharper focus on political turmoil in African this season. In case you missed this, military coups have recently toppled democratic governments in both Niger and Gabon.

These events continue a recent pattern. Sub-Saharan states have experienced nine military coups since 2020. As EU leaders weigh their options in responding to the most recent crises, an alliance of West African states has deployed troops.

Both coups carry important and broad lessons, writes economist Gilles Yabi for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Senegal, meanwhile, faces a historic election in early 2024. Things have been heating up there following an announcement by the country’s current president, Macky Sall, saying he will not seek reelection. While there is optimism for Senegal’s democratic prospects, there is fear too: especially after recent crackdowns on political opposition.

Visitors admire the Benin Bronzes at the British Museum. Looted in the colonial era, these plaques once adorned the Kingdom of Benin’s royal palace.

Jane Rix / Shutterstock

Africa’s present has been shaped deeply by the legacy of colonialism. Another topic we hope to cover, with Burrill’s help, is the question of repatriating cultural heritage. While European museums fret over whether and how to return valuable artifacts stolen in the age of empire, curators and artists in Africa have some concrete solutions to offer.

What about Will — where will he be?

He’s taking a break from the show and spending time at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, where he’ll get to hear what British scholars think of U.S. politics.

As Siva notes on the show, Oxford types have played an outsized role in shaping public policy in the United Kingdom, where they are often accused of being out of touch with ordinary people. After the chaotic leadership of Boris Johnson, could the UK experience a democratic renewal? If so, Will will let us know on the back end, no doubt.