ELA Community Explores Politics, Citizenship with Jon Lovett

Emerson Los Angeles students, faculty, and staff gathered last week for a dialogue on American culture and politics in a time of unprecedented change and uncertainty with Jon Lovett, former speechwriter for President Barack Obama. 

The host of the podcasts Lovett or Leave It and Pod Save America, kicked off UNPRECEDENTED 2025: A Teach-In on Expression and Communication in a Changing America on Friday, March 28, with a conversation moderated by faculty member Shana Lloyd about a wide range of issues facing America, including media coverage, the role of Hollywood in politics, and takeaways from the latest presidential election.

“We thought people understood the value of light disagreement, of hashing out your differences, having a vote; the winner wins, the loser shakes their hand,” said Lovett. “There are certain kinds of basic ideas that we all took for granted, basic democratic values, and it turns out they’re not self-perpetuating. We haven’t done enough to talk about why they’re important.”

When asked by Lloyd about what college students can do at this moment in history, Lovett encouraged them to get involved. 

“I look at a generation that is growing up online in this noisy, fractious, silly, sensational, viral world, and I don’t know how anybody would come to understand why we did things the way we did them,” said Lovett. “My hope is that we can figure out how we can get enough younger people to understand these values enough to fight for them and to be part of nonprofits in their communities that are fighting to build solidarity and political movements at the local level, to become part of the political process.”   

Following the conversation, ELA Faculty Fellow Professor Catherine H. Nguyen and ELA Assistant Academic Dean Mikhail Gershovich led an interactive workshop on ideas and key terms that animate American cultural and civic life in this historic moment.

They used the example of the word “citizen,” building out a word cloud with associated terms and engaging in discussion about what it means to be a citizen and how the definition might be changing today.

“It’s really important to create space for faculty, staff, and students to think through what’s happening together. To not only present differing ideas, but to also engage with those differences,” said Nguyen. “Rather than start off with an issue, or even present a specific angle or perspective, to give space for the many different perspectives, lines of thought, ways of thinking to enter into the space.”

During the workshop, participants split up into small groups and dissected key terms, like “media” and “democracy.” Each group wrote out words associated with their key term and engaged in discussion, eventually sharing their findings with the larger group and prompting discourse.

“It’s great to have members of our community come together and work through these different issues,” said Nguyen. “Coming to a place where we can hopefully make change in the world.”

Among the attendees of the teach-in was Theo Emerson ’24, who is a fan of Lovett and a long-time listener of his podcast.

“I’m very glad that people like [Lovett] are out there fighting every day to make sure that the good fight is being fought and that info is out there that people need to hear,” said Emerson. “I’m really glad that Emerson is providing spaces like this and events for people like Jon Lovett and other great speakers… to have a platform to speak to people like me and anyone else who’s interested in learning more and broadening their education.”