“Kids These Days” – Jennifer Earl at Penn DCC

Professor Jennifer Earl Presents at the Penn Program for Democracy, Citizenship and Constitutionalism (DCC) – “Kids These Days: Supply and Demand for Youth Online Political Engagement”

WHAT IS THE REAL POTENTIAL FOR ONLINE YOUTH ACTIVISM in the US? University of Arizona Professor of Sociology Jennifer Earl approaches the question from two directions.  How interested are youth in engaging in online political activity (what is the “demand” for this activity)?  And what kinds of opportunities are youth afforded to engage online (what is the “supply” of opportunities to engage in such activity)? In order to understand demand, she uses survey data from a random sample of teenagers and young adults to understand what kinds of activities are particularly attractive to different youth sub-groups (e.g., compares participation across race and ethnicity). Then, she uses data on random samples of websites on 20 different social movement issue areas to understand how and how often youth are specifically targeted for non-institutional engagement by social movements.

THIS EVENT will take place on Thursday, October 15th, at 4:30 p.m. in the Silverstein Forum of Stiteler Hall.

JENNIFER EARL is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona. She taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) before joining Arizona. She is Director Emerita of the Center for Information Technology and Society and Director Emerita of the Technology and Society PhD Emphasis, both at UCSB. Her research focuses on social movements and the sociology of law, with research emphases on the Internet and social movements, social movement repression, and legal change. She has published widely, including Digitally Enabled Social Change (2011), with Katrina Kimport, and articles in major sociological journals such as the American Sociological Review and the Annual Review of Sociology.

For more information about the Penn DCC Program, and to view a full schedule of events for 2015-2016, please see the Program website.