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Jenna Spinelle

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    Big Picture

    Iranian lawyer and human rights activist to receive 2023 Brown Democracy Medal

    Jenna Spinelle
    April 27, 2023
    Iranian lawyer and human rights activist to receive 2023 Brown Democracy Medal

    Human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh photographed in the garden of her office on December 9, 2014 in Tehran, Iran.

    Photo by Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images

    Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian lawyer and human rights activist who has been called “Iran’s Nelson Mandela” will receive the 2023 Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, marking the award's 10th year.

    Sotoudeh has dedicated her legal career to representing opposition activists in Iran, minors facing unfair sentences and women who protested Iran’s mandatory hijab law. Her clients have included Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi and pro-democracy activist Heshmat Tabarzadi.

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    Harnessing the power of 'we the people' on Independence Day

    Jenna Spinelle
    July 01, 2022
    Flags in front of the Capitol
    Bloomberg Creative/Getty Images

    Spinelle is the communications specialist for the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and host of the podcasts “When the People Decide” and “Democracy Works.”

    Democracy does not have a singular definition, which is one of the things that makes it so interesting to me — and undoubtedly to many of you.

    I don’t have a Ph.D. in political science, but I have done nearly hundreds of interviews with people about democracy in some form or another. During that time, I developed a working definition: Democracy is about the allocation of power among people. Yes, there are norms, institutions and processes. But power is at the heart of it all.

    Ballot initiatives are one way for citizens in more than 20 states to harness that power. In my new podcast series, “When the People Decide,” I explore how people have used the ballot initiative to bring issues they care deeply about directly to their fellow voters and push for political change on their own terms.

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