Democracy Laboratory

The Democracy Lab seeks to empower students, faculty, and the public using interdisciplinary methods in order to connect our communities and to strengthen the quality of our democracy. We draw inspiration and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ A More Perfect Union initiative and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship and its report Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century. In the best spirit of the Land Grant University mission, the Democracy Lab is an incubator where researchers, students, and the public can gather, discuss issues, discover and experiment with new ideas, and learn from one another.

Each academic year, the Democracy Lab program gathers an interdisciplinary and intergenerational team of people committed to the work of improving the quality of democracy and equality in our state, the nation, and the world. Cohort members receive the opportunity to hone, develop, produce, and publish both individual and collaborative projects related to research on the quality of democracy, community and community engagement, curriculum development, journalism and other topics. Cohort members participate in an interdisciplinary curriculum designed to facilitate their individual projects, develop community engagement skills, and become more productively engaged citizens.

The culminating events of the experience are a one-day symposium in which participants share the results of their work with the public (check out the previous events on this YouTube playlist).  Participants then publish their work in the Democracy Lab’s open-access journal Experiments in Democracy.

 

Read the Democracy Lab's journal Experiments in Democracy

 

For help thinking about democracy during this election year and into the future, the institute recommends Astra Taylor's documentary What is Democracy? Watch it here. The film is a companion to Taylor's book Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone, read by participants in the cohort program.

 

Call for Applications

The application for the Democracy Laboratory is closed. Please check back next fall for the call for the 2026-2027 cohort.

 

Advisory Committee

Scott Henkel | PI, director, Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research, departments of English and African American and Diaspora Studies

Amy Albrecht | director, Center for a Vital Community at Sheridan College

Stephanie Anderson | Head, School of Politics, Public Affairs, and International Studies

Adam Blackler | History, College of Arts and Sciences

Cathy Connolly | Gender and Women’s Studies, School of Culture Gender, and Social Justice, and member of the Wyoming House of Representatives

Sara Flitner | Flitner Strategies, former mayor of Jackson, WY, and Lead Facilitator of the ENDOW initiative

Jennifer Harmon | Family and Consumer Sciences, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources

Shawn Reese | Executive director, Wyoming Humanities Council and former Policy Director to Wyoming Governor Matt Mead

Janel Seeley | director, Elbogen Center for Teaching and Learning

Salem Stull | former Project Coordinator, Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research

Riley Talamantes | UW undergraduate and former ASUW President

Samantha Vandermeade | Gender and Women’s Studies

Chen Xu |Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center