Dr. Doug McAdam, Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar and professor of Sociology at Stanford University,will speak on Monday, April 18 at 7:30 p.m. in Whitley Auditorium. His talk is titled “The Long-term Civic Impact of Youth Activism: The Curious Contrast between Freedom Summer and Teach for America.”
His lecture will focus on two groups of young activists: the applicants to the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project and those offered teaching positions by Teach for America during years 3-8 of the program. His aim in both studies is to assess the enduring effect of the experience on the subsequent civic/political lives of the two groups. His research includes a follow-up study of the long term “civic effects” of youth service; research on the dynamics of neighborhood collective action in Chicago from 1965 to 2005; and a study examining the influence of prior racial conflict on the location of arson attacks on black churches in the U.S. between 1995 and 2001. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Dr. McAdam, the former director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, is the author or coauthor of 11 books and more than 70 articles in the area of political sociology with a special emphasis on the study of social movements and revolution. Elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he served as vice president of the American Sociological Association (2007-08), and he has received fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, the NEH, and the Guggenheim and W.T. Grant Foundations.
The event is free and open to the public.