The fourth annual Elijah E. Cummings Democracy and Freedom Festival will bring together scholars and practitioners from across the country to join with the Johns Hopkins and Baltimore communities.
The fourth annual Elijah E. Cummings Democracy and Freedom Festival will bring together scholars and practitioners from across the country to join with the Johns Hopkins and Baltimore communities in grappling with some of the most urgent challenges facing democracy, modeling civic engagement across divides, and celebrating democratic resilience and opportunity. The festival is taking place on Thursday, February 8, 2024, at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture in Baltimore City.
This year, we will be exploring the theme of civic education. The festival will begin with a keynote expanding how we think about civic education, followed by a plenary discussion with experts from education, media, and government exploring how and where civics education should occur as well as the innovations being made to strengthen civics in their fields and communities of practice.
The plenary will be followed by an afternoon of breakout sessions with three tracks focused on approaches to bolstering civic education in and across classrooms, news rooms, and the hearing rooms where laws and policy are made. A dinner break will follow the breakouts offering festivalgoers a “People’s Supper”—a shared meal with guided conversation meant to build trust and connection among people of different identities and perspectives. The festival will culminate in the evening with a debate exploring how decisions made by tech companies impact our ability to engage with and understand our democracy and what can or should be done to balance the needs for accurate information and our rights to free speech, privacy and more.
The festival is being hosted by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, an academic and public forum dedicated to improving and expanding civic engagement and informed, inclusive dialogue as the cornerstone of global democracy. Learn more about the SNF Agora Institute.