Join or Die
with Prof. Robert Putnam in personThis compelling and playful documentary is about why you should join a club — and why the fate of American democracy depends on it. Pre-show discussion.
Democracy on CameraLegendary social scientist Robert Putnam rocketed to fame in the 1990s with his groundbreaking book Bowling Alone , which posited that America's decades-long decline in community connections could hold the answers to our democracy's present crisis. As the unraveling of our social fabric has accelerated in the COVID era, the public is searching for fundamental explanations of our civic decline: Why don't our politics or government work? Why can't we see eye-to-eye with our neighbors? What accounts for the gap between the empowered few and the disempowered many?
The answers to these questions are complex—and no single scholar can definitively answer any of them. But Robert Putnam is a master at translating his trailblazing social science research into engaging stories, and this illuminating and hopeful documentary (which also played at the 2024 White River Indie Fest) brings those ideas to the big screen.
Flanked by influential fans and scholars—from Hillary Clinton and Pete Buttigieg to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy—as well as inspiring groups building community in neighborhoods across the country, join Bob as he explores why American democracy is in crisis and, most importantly, what we can do about it.
D: Rebecca Davis & Pete Davis, US, 2023, Closed Captions, 1h33m
Pre-show discussion with Harvard Professor Robert Putnam, led by Professor Charles Wheelan. Programmed in collaboration with the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy , Dartmouth Dialogues and the Dartmouth Programming Board .
Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam is America's preeminent political scientist—and one of the most widely read and cited social scientists living today. Author of 14 books, translated into 20 languages, his work focuses on asking big questions about American society and deploying immense, creative studies and analyses to unlock answers.
His groundbreaking Bowling Alone research—which demonstrated that levels of American community connections were in decline over the past half-century—rocketed Putnam to national fame in the late 1990s, earning him the moniker "the poet laureate of civil society" and the ear of presidents, religious leaders and tech founders over the coming decades. In 2012, President Obama awarded Putnam the National Humanities Medal, the nation's highest honor for contributions to the humanities. As more Americans turn on to the reality of our social isolation crisis, a consistent drumbeat of media interest in revisiting Putnam's work has grown.
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