Inaugural Theme 2025-2026 Inspiring Democratic Engagement
The Rutgers Democracy Lab (RDL) represents a bold commitment to ensuring future generations have the tools and knowledge needed to strengthen and sustain democracy because democracy offers the best path for protecting liberty and securing individual rights. The RDL seeks to empower students from all academic disciplines to come together with faculty, staff, scholar-practitioners, and community members to solve society’s most pressing challenges and advance democratic principles. An incubator, the Lab tackles challenges facing systems of self-government; exploring, experimenting, and testing new ideas and potential solutions; and developing evidence-based best practices to support and enhance democracy.
RDL invites students, faculty, and staff from across the university and across disciplines to apply for RDL opportunities ranging from civic learning cohorts and fellowships to funding opportunities to catalyze a wide range of ground-breaking and innovative projects and ideas. Democracy is facing complex challenges, so the RDL places a heavy emphasis on interdisciplinary innovation. Democracy is multi-faceted, so RDL calls on the expertise and talent of students from all disciplines–spanning from the arts to zoology (and everything in between!)–to develop innovative solutions to democracy’s biggest challenges.
Inaugural Theme 2025-2026: RDL’s inaugural theme is Inspiring Democratic Engagement. This theme will be woven through the core components of the Rutgers Democracy Lab:
- Civic Learning: How will we capture people’s civic imagination and equip them with the knowledge, skills and dispositions they need to inspire democratic action?
- Democratic Engagement: What can we do to inspire each other to be involved in civic life?
- Talking across Difference: How can we create opportunities to explore contemporary issues from different perspectives and inspire people to keep talking to each other?
- Cyber-Social Civics: How does technology impact democracy’s evolution? How can digital media and emerging technologies shape our democracy? How can we improve the state of online discourse and use technology to rebuild trust and strengthen democratic participation? How can we counter false information on social media? What strategies can we use to increase youth civic engagement?