Seminar Program Helps Students Discover What It Means to Be Democratically Engaged

As America marks its 250th anniversary and with the midterm elections approaching, Bryne Seminars at Rutgers-New Brunswick aim to combat Gen Z's "civic deserts"

What would Aristotle think of Forrest Gump?

To Elif Sendur, an assistant teaching professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, the slightly absurd question also is a profound thought exercise on the meaning of democracy.

"Aristotle believed that a good citizen was an active citizen, but in the movie, Forrest was often a passive observer of politics," said Sendur, whose expertise includes philosophy and cinema. "So, what kind of citizen was he?"

In recognition of America's 250th anniversary and with the 2026 midterm elections approaching, Sendur is among a group of Rutgers professors challenging students with one of the nation's most fundamental questions: What does it mean to participate in a democracy?

The vehicle for exploring this question is the Byrne Seminars, small, one-credit classes that give first-year undergraduates an opportunity to engage with topics ranging from artificial intelligence to yoga.

This fall for the first time, the Rutgers Democracy Lab at the Eagleton Institute of Politics is partnering with the seminars on a limited series of courses examining the history and significance of democracy and civic engagement. Of the 73 Byrne Seminars currently offered, seven are democracy related, the most ever on a single theme during one semester, said James Register, Senior Program Administrator for the Byrne First-Year Seminars.

For Sendur, whose course is titled "Who Counts as 'The People?' Democracy and Representation in American Cinema," the conversations are deeply personal. Sendur became a U.S. citizen in 2020, formalizing her ties to a country she said has one of the world's most "beautiful" democratic systems.

Sendur uses literature, writings and cinema to examine America's brand of democracy. One of their first readings, the Declaration of Independence, includes a promise unique to the U.S.: the self-evident truth that citizens have a right to the "pursuit of happiness."

"We talk about how revolutionary that idea is and how different it is from other social contract theories," Sendur said.

Students then explore how that pursuit has been experienced, as depicted in films covering a wide range of democratic themes, including structural exclusion in Killer of Sheep; community-based politics in Black Panthers; protest and dissent in Hair; and queer political visibility in Milk.

Nicholas Longo, director of the Rutgers Democracy Lab, said democratic exclusion is one theme he hopes students discover and discuss during the Byrne Seminars.

"Many young people tell us that they live in civic deserts and haven't had an opportunity to be in healthy spaces where they're learning about and practicing democracy," Longo said. "We want to make sure, regardless of their major, that students can get involved in democracy at Rutgers, and the Byrne Seminars are a perfect way to do that."

There is an urgency to succeeding, Longo said. While Americans are heavily divided, 58% of Gen Z and Millennials said these splits will culminate in a second civil war, according to a 2024 poll by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion.

Healing these divisions will require practicing democracy in new, more inclusive ways, said Longo.

"We're trying to help students build pathways to engage," he said.

The idea of democracy as something practiced between elections is a component of another Democracy Lab-supported seminar, "Invisible Voters and the Making of Democracy," co-taught by Charles Senteio and Tawfiq Ammari of the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, Department of Library and Information Science.

Their course asks students to explore how individuals and communities participate in and shape democracy even when they are not formally represented within it.

The course examines democratic participation across time and among different communities. Readings include W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America, Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Hannah Arendt's On Revolution.

"Our goal is to help students figure out what it means to engage in a democracy in between elections, where most of the work in a democracy happens," Ammari said. "We all must figure for ourselves what it means to be a citizen."

As for Sendur, she said her class is divided on whether the great Greek philosopher would have approved of Forrest Gump's democratic engagement. And that, in a way, is the point.

"It's fitting because democracy, at the end of the day, is about thinking and working together in contested spaces," she said. "Even when we disagree."