Democracy's Child: Young People and the Politics of Control, Leverage, and Agency

In this sweeping and innovative study, Gash and Tichenor place young people at the heart of pivotal conflicts, decisions and transformations in American politics. From the March for Our Lives and Black Lives Matter, to Gay Straight Alliances and the Dreamer and Sunrise movements, they show how the prominence of young people as agents of change are unmistakable in contemporary political life. In a lively narrative that's at once highly accessible and sharply analytical, Democracy's Child reveals why the control, leveraging, and agency of young people shapes and defines our political landscape.

Alison Gash is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Oregon. Her research focuses on the substantive intersections of law and social policy and their capacity to both reify and reform systems of exclusion-particularly those affecting BIPOC, Queer, and low-income communities. She is the author of Below the Radar: How Silence Can Save Civil Rights (Oxford, 2015) as well as numerous articles on legal advocacy and collaborative governance published in Law & Social Inquiry, JPART, and a range of other peer-reviewed journals. She has received multiple awards for her teaching, research and social justice advocacy including the Christian Bay Award, the Herman Award for Specialized Pedagogy and the Martin Luther King Award for Social Justice. Gash is a frequent public lecturer with One Day University and contributor to outlets, including Politico, Newsweek, Washington Monthly, Slate, Washington Post, Fortune, The Conversation, and National Public Radio.

Daniel J. Tichenor is the Philip H. Knight Chair of Social Science and Wayne Morse Center Senior Fellow at the University of Oregon. A scholar of immigration policy, social movements, and political history, he has published nine books, including Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control and Rivalry and Reform: Presidents, Social Movements and the Transformation of American Politics. His research awards include the American Political Science Association's Gladys Kammerer Award, Jack Walker Prize, Mary Parker Follette Award, Polity Prize, and Charles Redd Award. He has been a fellow at Princeton's School of Policy and International Affairs, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Abba Schwartz Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, a research scholar at the Eagleton Institute of Politics, and was named to the inaugural class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows in 2015. He has testified and provided expert briefings to Congress on immigration law and policy, and provided commentary and essays for National Public Radio, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Utne Reader, and The Nation.