Building and sustaining social change with Hahrie Han

We all want to be part of something, but sometimes being part of a grand social movement or boundary-pushing campaigns feels out of reach. Yet our desire for connection and the need for our voices to be heard can often be found closer to home, in the everyday needs we have for safe neighbourhoods, improved local schools, or social cohesion within our communities. How are we enabled to do this work, building the slow shared politics of social change and cohesion? And how can we build stronger societies that can withstand the technological and social transformations through which we are now living?

In recent years, activism and campaigning have often been framed through the ideals of the individual as the prime mover and voice for change, both in our identities and in our actions. The heroic ‘changemaker’ or activist who, inspired by their own lived experience, is called to take a stand. Yet, if you ask anyone who has made real change, any national or local leader, what drove the change they have achieved, they will speak of something much more profound.

Exploring these more profound ideas sits at the heart of Professor Hahrie Han’s work. As Director of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, a multi-million-dollar initiative to enhance democratic politics, Han has rigorously studied the way activists and community-based campaigners can play a major role in sustaining politics and society.

Central to this thinking has been the divide between what Han describes as politics as spectacle versus politics as practice. The politics as spectacle views the mechanisms of social change as dependent on creating spectacles that draw widespread public engagement. Focusing on spectacle puts the focus on work undertaken by individuals, born of their identity and the issues they are interested in, such as posting outrage on social media or signing a petition. In contrast, politics as practice requires us to build sustained networks across difference - not in the name of compromise or finding the ‘middle ground’ but to try to change the world together, navigating political and social challenges in a way that is fundamentally shared.

When I spoke to Han, she was partway through her visit to the UCL Policy Lab, working with our friends at Act Build Change, where she met with leading voices from the Lab’s Ecosystem Project. This was just weeks after Donald Trump's victory in the United States, and Han was clear on this moment signalling a real challenge to politics as usual.

​​”Part of what we are seeing with events such as the recent election in the US is a growing gap between what we might think of as the political class and the non-political class - of people who pay attention to and are aware of and think about politics and people who don't”.

Han believes that millions of ordinary voters now feel that the social, political, and economic institutions that govern our society are not adequately in touch with the lives of those they seek to govern. Such people experience politics as a spectacle they observe, in which most ordinary voters sit back and just watch as the political class dominates the stage, and fails to seek or build longer-term connections across a range of social experiences.

Han believes that this leads to the inevitable consumerist approach to politics, as new political spectacles and products appear on the democratic shelf.

“When politics is a spectacle, we treat it like we treat ketchup at the grocery store. I choose which brand I want to try. If I don't like it, I just throw that one out and buy another one.”

If, as Han says, politics fails to build deep and meaningful connections beyond the four or five-year election cycle, then established parties can’t expect voters not to turn to new and exciting political brands as they appear - in times of tumult the urge to reach for change and the new becomes ever more appealing.

It’s why her work seems so relevant to the age of Trump and populism. Han suggests that there is another way to engage people to build connections between citizens, politics, and social change.

She believes in building a politics that reaches out and builds sustained connections through both action and practice.

“The alternative to this failed approach is a politics of practice, one that is embedded in the complexities and nuances of human life. It's a lot harder to build and sustain. Still, it creates an experience in which people, not only those of a certain political class but people of all kinds, can have the experience of being active agents within a political system”.

Han believes this can have a marked change in how people experience politics.

“Instead of feeling like they're just consumers of a political system, they participate in it.”

Han knows a thing or two about change on the ground. She hasn’t chosen to build a career and a centre at Johns Hopkins on the back of just academic papers and conference presentations - although she has a stellar record in both – she’s rolled up her sleeves and involved herself in the messy world of community politics and understanding. Speaking with and working alongside those who often disagree on fundamental issues yet are forced to navigate the burdens of ordinary living.

It was a practice built on her early years, growing up in Texas, as the child of Korean migrants.

“Being the daughter of immigrants and growing up in Texas gave me a keen sense of the ability of people to transform themselves and the horizons of what's possible through their own choices. Part of what attracted me to organizing, social movements, and collective action is that at its core, it's about transforming people into agents of public life and then learning how they build collective change”.

In recent years, Han has successfully built her work on the belief that we cannot sustain social change through individual democratic actions alone, but by building shared democratic tools. As Han puts it, it is about developing our democratic muscle memory.

“Like all of us, I need a gym to exercise my muscles. I have to keep them from atrophying because I'm not born with all the kinds of healthy muscles to sustain a long and healthy life”.

“And so in the same way that we're not born with the muscles for democracy that we need. We must exercise and stretch them outside of elections”.

As Han and her colleagues have shown, rapid social and technological changes have uprooted and disturbed the channels for discussion and social change. Where once there were unions and long-standing civic institutions, now there are social networks and cultural movements. Yet this doesn’t mean we can’t build and develop new tools and networks for democratic participation and change.

In her most recent book, Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church, Han explores how a Christian congregation at an Ohio megachurch - think confetti cannons and strobe lighting - worked to overcome the deep divisions of race in modern America. This isn’t a story of a straightforward moral fight in which good conquers evil, where the arc of history bends inextricably towards justice. It is about individuals working within their small communities of family, work and leisure to tackle and navigate deep and historic pain.

“Undivided essentially chronicles the kind of complicated, messy, but very human work of people who are trying to ask this question about what it means for me to live out the values of anti-racism in my life”.

What is apparent in this portrait of a very modern church with some pretty old ideas is that the work of change is messy and not always about singular victories or even goals. It is contained within the lifelong work of friendships and institutions, be that the church or the PTA. You come away with a renewed sense that to sustain political change in the long term, the work to sustain and develop civic life must start now.

“Many people doing the work experience backlash from their families, workplace, and church community. They needed the scaffolding of organising and new tools to sustain them in the reconciliation programme. In a sense, it was about developing an internal compass to help them navigate through the thicket of organisational and institutional change”.

If Han and work like hers is vital in America, it is as vital in the UK and Europe. Our democratic institutions are tested in new ways, yet we hear political history's echoes. From the tumult of reformation to the revolutions of the 19th century, technological and social change has always been accompanied by new forms of political practice. Running alongside this change has been a need to understand and develop shared tools for democratic renewal and change.

As we meet our moment of transformation, we, too, must fashion new tools for social change. In Han’s work, we find vital lessons for our moment.