Recent patterns of democratic “backsliding” around the world have followed in the wake of a generalized weakening of organized labor under the modern, globalized variant of capitalism. Scholars have long debated whether and how labor contributes to the construction of democratic regimes and the expansion of social citizenship rights, but the current period makes it abundantly clear that democratic advances are always subject to reversal. As such, it is imperative to interrogate labor’s role in the defense of democratic rights and liberties, and not merely the introduction or expansion of those rights.These questions call for a multi-dimensional approach to the study of labor’s relationship to democracy, one that explores labor’s role in (1) constructing democratic regimes, (2) “deepening” democracy by expanding social citizenship rights, and (3) defending democracy against its adversaries and authoritarian currents in society.

Describes the logic behind Sesame Street interventions’ design and goals, through the performance of concise encoding and production studies of the text of Israeli and Palestinian versions. Compares how the producers intended, negotiated, and expressed the text’s encoding with how the child audience decoded the series after broadcast, thereby revealing how the PeaceComm interventions may have “worked” on the children. The glocalized hybrid series—produced in the euphoric period of the Oslo Peace Accords in the mid-1990s by separate but intertwined Israeli, Palestinian and American teams, later joined by a Jordanian crew, in multiple zones—interpreted and negotiated the American team’s, Sesame Workshop’s, global concept to fit local concerns, incorporating original Sesame Street segments dubbed into Hebrew or Arabic during both optimistic and crisis conflict phases. They created two separate street-state sets and series, privileging the intersection of the axis of ethnopolitical “group” identity and state-based citizenship rights to populate each street-state. The closed text of a “mediated contact effects” PeaceComm model illustrating pro-social interactions between and within the two streets operated in tandem with television’s open text that allowed children to read it on different levels. This inherent contradiction complicated the series’ potential to effectively build and make peace.