Culture is all around us — but we take it for granted, says Michele Gelfand, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

“It’s often only until you get outside of your cultural context — your cultural bubble, we might call it — that you start realizing, wow, I’ve actually been socialized by my parents, by my teachers, by the institutions that reward or punish certain behaviors. I’ve been socialized my whole life to adopt a certain set of values and norms, to construct a self, so to speak, that fits into that cultural context,” she says.

Click here to read more and listen to the if/then podcast from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

On Tuesday, June 3, a largely student audience gathered for an urgent and moving conversation: Persisting in Hard Times, a panel highlighting the work and insights of four extraordinary practitioners who have spent their lives confronting injustice, responding to crises, and working every day toward a more equitable and humane society.

The conversation was co-organized by Hakeem Jefferson, assistant professor of political science and faculty director of the Program on Identity, Democracy, and Justice at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and Gillian Slee, the 2024-25 Gerhard Casper Postdoctoral Fellow in Rule of Law at CDDRL and incoming assistant professor of sociology at the University of Georgia. It was co-moderated by Jefferson and Karina Kloos, Executive Director of the Democracy Hub and ePluribus Stanford.

In organizing the event, Slee framed it as follows:

What does it mean to persist in hard times? The country is wrestling with major questions right now — about rights and resources, belonging and expression, well-being and justice. How we proceed will shape our understanding of American democracy and have real consequences for daily life within this country.

You are all here today because you recognize we are living through hard times. Throughout the year, we have had conversations across campus about democratic norms, the rule of law, and the exercise or availability of rights and resources. Students in the room today are wrapping up a quarter of asking critical questions about the state and health of American democracy. These questions and their answers are urgent and consequential.

Still, we seek a different kind of conversation today. Our focus is on persisting through hard times. Our orientation is particular. Today’s panelists draw on unique expertise working in the trenches to respond to crises that imperil dignity, justice, and well-being. When they think about the major questions of our times, each panelist has the capacity to see the faces of clients, constituents, workers, immigrants, students, neighbors, and more. They know what it means to address urgent, immediate crises through on-the-ground daily action. They also know what it means to engage in work that is sometimes underfunded, lonely, and pursued with long odds.

Importantly, their work is fueled by a vision of a wildly promising future in which people, especially those from marginalized groups, have opportunities to thrive.

The panelists brought this vision to life. Professor Pam Karlan, a renowned constitutional scholar and professor at Stanford Law, reflected on the role of history, poetry, and truth in helping her persist. She recommended three poems that offer solace and clarity in this moment: Langston Hughes’ Let America Be America Again, Marge Piercy’s The Low Road, and Tennyson’s Ulysses, with its enduring call: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

DeCarol Davis, Director of the Community Legal Services Program at Legal Aid at Work, spoke powerfully about being shaped by a Black family with deep roots in the South — roots that helped prepare her for navigating systems marked by discrimination and inequality. She reminded us that persisting is not new, and that her work is animated by a long legacy of Black resilience and clarity of purpose.

Alison Kamhi, Legal Director of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, shared stories of the immigrants her work brings her into contact with — people for whom hard times are not new, but ongoing. She charted what has shifted — and what has not — in U.S. immigration policy and enforcement, and spoke to the emotional and moral weight of sustaining this work amid cruelty and complacency.

Poet, public servant, and Stanford PhD candidate Antonio López offered a stirring meditation on proximity to harm and the moral responsibility it demands. His poem, Opening Statement, anchored the room in both clarity and conviction. It was a poet who reminded us that we are all implicated — and that this implication opens up opportunities for all of us to act. López also pointed us to the many lessons embedded in Black liberation struggles and other freedom movements that offer enduring blueprints for persisting in this moment.

Throughout the conversation, Kloos invited panelists to reflect on where they find joy in the midst of struggle. Drawing from Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy, she asked what it means for joy to coexist with strain and uncertainty — a question that brought the panel back to the everyday practices that nourish courage and clarity.

The audience Q&A that followed surfaced difficult, generative questions: What can the law do — and what can it not do? What does solidarity require of us? And how do we ensure that the most vulnerable among us, including trans communities, are not forgotten in the push for change?

The conversation closed with a powerful exchange about community, belonging, and the intertwined nature of our fates. Jefferson ended by noting that perhaps a key part of persisting in this moment, especially for those of us with so much privilege, is to remember — as Dr. King reminded us — that our fates are inextricably bound together, that unfreedom for our neighbors is unfreedom for us, and that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

How have pre-communist social structures persisted in Russia, and why does this persistence matter for understanding post-communist political regime trajectories? In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Tomila Lankina, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, discussed her award-winning book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge University Press, 2022). The book challenges the assumption that the 1917 revolution succeeded in leveling old estate hierarchies, arguing that these social structures persist today. 

While analyses of the bourgeoisie factor heavily into the understanding of many societies, the relevance of this group is frequently left out when discussing countries like Russia and China, on the assumption that they had been completely leveled by revolutionary ruptures. Lankina’s book critically assesses this assumption. It adopts a uniquely interdisciplinary approach, utilizing archives, subnational comparisons, statistical analysis, social network analysis, and interviews with descendants. 

In characterizing the social structure of pre-communist Russia, Lankina noted that peasants comprised 77 percent of the population on the eve of the revolution. Other social groups, which she refers to as “educated estates” because of their higher literacy rates compared to those of peasants, included the urban meshchane, the merchants, nobility, and clergy. Out of the educated estates, meshchane constituted the majority, or 10 percent of the population. While their homes appeared rather modest, members of the meshchane exhibited characteristics of the urban bourgeoisie, and even their dress differed from that of the rural estate. They enjoyed much higher literacy rates than peasants.

Lankina explained that the comparatively high status of these “educated estates” — the meshchane, merchants, nobility, and clergy — persisted even after the Bolshevik revolution. To illustrate this, she highlighted partially intact social circles of the highly networked merchants, nobles, and tsarist-inspired soviet schools. Letters from the Samara province indicate that while many high-status citizens emigrated, there were matriarchs who stayed, spreading the tsarist-era values to their children and grandchildren after the revolution. Regardless of whether this middle class was endowed with democratic values, Lankina maintained that they passed human and entrepreneurial capital onto their offspring.

How did these estates endure? While the literature clearly articulates what happened to the ruling classes following the revolution, less time has been spent understanding what happened to the educated, middle-class segments of society. How did they adapt? 

Lankina proposed three different routes. First is the “pop-up brigade,” wherein young, educated individuals traveled around promoting education to peasant workers, instantly employable and absorbable into a new society. Then there is the “museum society,” where prominent nobles and merchants joined insular cultural institutions like archives, provincial libraries, and museums. Finally, “the organization man” denotes professionally skilled individuals, such as medics, who retained their positions following the revolution as the social hierarchy got absorbed into newer organizations. 

To illustrate the significance of this persistence in social structures and values, Lankina, drawing on her co-authored paper with Alexander Libman (APSR 2021), indicated that meshchane concentration (as opposed to more recent educational indices) is a better predictor of a post-communist region’s openness, at least in the 1990s.

In an era marked by profound societal transformations, identity, democracy, and justice have become central to the discourse on shaping fair and inclusive societies. Recognizing the imperative to delve into these complex issues, political scientist Hakeem Jefferson is launching a new research initiative at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. The Program on Identity, Democracy, and Justice (IDJ) serves as a nexus for researchers committed to unraveling the multifaceted dimensions of identity and informing tangible steps toward a more equitable future.

Against the backdrop of diverse topics such as racial and ethnic identity, gender and sexuality, religion, class, and citizenship, the IDJ program emerges as a hub for interdisciplinary collaboration. Its reach extends beyond academic circles, bringing together researchers and organizations who are thinking about how to build fairer, more inclusive societies.

“Hakeem's work on race and politics in America is an important part of the Center's expanding work on the quality of American democracy,” shared Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL. “We are thrilled to launch this new program on such a crucial issue at CDDRL.”

"This program is the embodiment of years of hard work by Hakeem Jefferson in building an innovative research agenda and a vibrant scholarly community attentive to pressing questions on struggles for recognition, inclusion, and social justice,” added Hesham Sallam, the Center’s Associate Director for Research. “I look forward to seeing the program flourish and grow while contributing to intellectual life at CDDRL and Stanford at large."