Political Representation and its Challenges: Student Projects
Maurits Meijers
As part of the Master’s level course Political Representation and its Challenges our political science students create a project that addresses the question:
As part of the Master’s level course Political Representation and its Challenges our political science students create a project that addresses the question:
‘What is the biggest challenge for political representation today?’
While most student projects require students to write academic essays, this project is open format. That means that students are free to decide what kind of product they want to create in answering their question. Having specified the specific aims and target audience of their project, the students create a project that fits these aims and speaks to the target audience. In the past years, students have created a board game, podcasts, a photo series, websites, blogs, and vlogs. Here’s a Tweet summarizing last year’s projects.
This year, I was truly impressed by the richness, relevance, and creativity of the projects. Let’s go through them one by one. Some projects are available in their entirety. Others are not available for copyright or privacy reasons.
The Unheard: The Populist Challenge to Representative Liberal Democracy
By Camille Collados, Rogier van der Weide, Isabelle Klaver, and Pelle Depla
This magazine attempts to try to counter-act pervasive populist ideas in society. As the students write, “This project is addressing exactly this: populist radical right parties are eroding liberal representative democracy by presenting the people as a homogenous group of individuals that are unheard and ignored by the ruling political elites, excluding people that do not fit into this conception of the people.” To counter populist thought, the project consists of a beautifully designed magazine intended for the general public. The magazine includes both analyses of underrepresentation, discussion what populism means, an interview with the eminent populism scholar Prof. Cas Mudde (University of Georgia). Moreover, the magazine contains three different stories of people that feel unheard by contemporary political representation, featuring the stories of a homeless man, a refugee and a more practically educated member of the LGBTQ+ community.
Please find the entire magazine here. (pdf, 2,3 MB)
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