Current Projects Much of my work in political sociology investigates how culture sets the terms of strategic action, but culture understood less as beliefs and worldviews than as familiar relationships, institutional routines, and conventions of self-expression. In my book Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (University of Chicago Press, 2002), I showed that activists over the course of a century styled their radical democracies variously on friendship, religious fellowship, and tutelage — and fractured along the lines of those relationships. In It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2006), I investigated the political advantages and risks of telling stories, especially for disadvantaged groups. Popular conventions of storytelling have created obstacles to reform, I argued, less by limiting what disadvantaged groups can imagine than by limiting the occasions on which they can tell authoritative stories. In 2002, I studied and participated in wide ranging efforts to involve the public in decision making about what to build on the site of the former World Trade Center in the wake of the 9/11 disaster. The interviews, participant observation, and discussion transcripts that I gathered have formed the basis for a series of book chapters and journal articles on the conditions for egalitarian and informed public deliberation. My current projects extend my interests in democracy, deliberation, protest, and culture: 1. Is the Public Sphere Becoming Feminized—and At What Cost? Feminists have long been critical of the Habermassian ideal of a public sphere in which citizens ’ discussions are governed by reason rather than status. Although women have gained access to a public sphere once restricted to men, say feminists, they continue to be disadvantaged by the abstract discourse of reason giving that is privileged in formal public deliberative forums. My research, pursued with Pang Ching Bobby Chen, shows that criticism to be outdated. In the public forums that pass as contemporary incarnations of the public sphere, women are as active and influential as men. We come to that conclusion based in part on the most systematic study of gender differences in participation in an online public forum. Women, we show, posted messages as often as men and voiced opinions as often as men; their messages were as long as men’s; women introduced topics as often as men; their messages were responded to, and responded to respectfully, as often as were men’s. This was true in groups in which women predominated and groups in which men predominated. We consider explanations for these findings based in expectations states theory, deliberative theory, and feminist theory, and find them all wanting. We advance, instead, an explanation based on the gendered character of the institutional setting of public talk. Sites of citizen talk such as legislative hearings, juries, internet chat rooms, radio call-in shows, and public deliberative forums vary in the extent to which they are culturally coded male or female. In female-coded sites, where the professionals who organize and facilitate public talk are mainly women with backgrounds in feminized professions and where the favored modes of talk and action emphasize stereotypically feminine values, women are likely to be as active and influential as men. Our preliminary analysis of the field of contemporary American public deliberation indicates that it is indeed female-gendered. This seems to account well for women’s equality within public deliberative forums. In the next phase of our project, we are exploring additional cases. In addition, we are investigating the less salutary possibility that women’s influence within deliberative forums may be accompanied by the diminished influence of public deliberation in the larger field of politics. 2. Stories of Sexual Assault. Scholars of narrative have demonstrated narrative’s effectiveness in changing people’s opinions. However, the same stories can be told in different ways. Scholars have not yet analyzed the role of genre in shaping audiences’ response to narratives. In this study, conducted with Amanda Ebner and Monica Trigoso, 180 college women read and answered questions about four first-person stories of sexual assault structured by different but familiar plotlines. We chose stories about sexual assault because college rapes go largely unreported to police. What inhibits reporting, say experts, is familiar myths about what constitutes a “real” rape. We were interested in whether we could craft stories that would lead respondents to endorse protagonists’ reporting the rape to police even if the protagonist was not seriously injured or was not “innocent” of sexually inviting behavior. Our findings indicate that the moral lessons audiences draw from stories are indeed shaped by familiar plotline. In particular, the tragic plotline that is common in stories of sexual assault in outreach efforts may have the opposite effect than that intended. In line with the tragic genre, our respondents either blamed the protagonist for her rape or saw it as inevitable. Neither response was consistent with reporting the rape to police. On the other hand, a heroic storyline with an assertive protagonist was also unsuccessful: respondents neither identified with the protagonist nor recommended her story for an outreach effort. In explaining why that was the case, we come to a curious conclusion. Our respondents disliked the protagonist’s assertiveness, not for being unfeminine, but for isolating her from her friends. The fact that respondents read a different story than the one we wrote points to audiences’ capacity to read stories through the lens of diverse (but not unlimited) plotlines. 3. Survey of Public Deliberation Practitioners. The field of public dialogue and deliberation is growing dramatically-- so dramatically, in fact, that no one fully knows what the field looks like: who is doing public dialogue and deliberation work, what forms their work is taking, what professional backgrounds they come from, and what common challenges they face. With Caroline Lee, I am surveying people who organize and facilitate dialogue and deliberation. 4.Is the Internet Creating New Reasons to Protest? Has the Internet contributed not only to the supply of protest but to the demand for it? Have new digital technologies helped to create new identities, new grievances, new rationales for protest, and new terrains of contention? Social movement scholars have been skeptical, but in this paper, Pang Ching Bobby Chen, Beth Gardner, Alice Motes, and I argue that it has. Recognizing just how requires revising assumptions that have underpinned the study of collective action; notably, that protest is hard work and that it involves moving issues and people from the private sphere to the public one. As new digital technologies erode barriers to participation, they are also transforming the typical calculus of participation: online friendships, for example, may not only get people over the hump from concern about an issue to participation, but may create the concern in the first place. As the Internet is eroding boundaries between private and public spheres, it is also transforming popular understandings of what counts as political. On one hand, people increasingly shift among spheres of consumption, leisure, sociability, and protest without recognizing boundaries among them. On the other, they may experience current laws around intellectual property more as an immediate threat than as one more front in a long running battle for artistic freedom.