How does the state ignore? Ideologies and practices of substantive and procedural listening in U.S. school board meetings

Abstract

For democracy to function, sometimes—even often—people must be ignored, not silenced. In this paper, we turn to U.S. school board meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore how people organize to ignore specific speech acts or participant roles in local democratic contexts. Focusing on the semiotic organization of these meetings, we ask: how does the state listen to its citizens—or not? Why do people repeatedly show up to participate in local democratic fora despite widespread disillusionment with their effectiveness? And how are individuals socialized to expect democratic participant structures organized around substantive uptake rather than procedural listening? We analyze the “state ignored subject” and its double, the “state-ignoring subject,” as institutionally structured and inhabited figures in the reflexively public space of the U.S. school board meeting. We show how these positions do not revolve around offering or refusing seats at the metaphorical table but strategically managing what happens after seats are allocated and voices are given space—seats and voices that might need to be categorically ignored for decisions to be made.