Good morning, friends! It gives me great pleasure to share with you two upcoming webinars.
First, on April 28th, we will be hosting three experts in Holocaust education to preview a new series of lessons that can be used to teach the Holocaust in the 6-12 classroom. We are grateful for Dr. Fine, Professor Carter, and Ms. Adkinson for their hard work on these lessons and their willingness to share them during the webinar!
Essential Conversations is celebrating one year! Essential Conversations was created by the Center for Purposeful Leadership as a response to the disruption felt worldwide with the events of 2020, in the hopes of engaging and activating leaders. If you haven’t checked it out yet, Essential Conversations is a weekly event with the purpose of hosting provocative and evocative conversations, interactive breakouts, and community conversations to equip you with strategies, inspiration and ideas to create change and innovation needed for coherence, resilience and positive impact. Anyone looking to create a positive impact in their family, community or organizational circles are welcomed to these 1.5 hour conversations.
Additional details on upcoming sessions and to register read below or navigate to the original post here.
What are the Essential Conversations?
Every Monday, we convene a conversation with either a Conversation Starter or community conversation addressing these questions:
What is a positive response in times of extreme disruption?
As one who steps forward to help, how are you sustained and renewed?
The Design: Each 1.5-hour convergence follows the structure of the 9-Steps Convening Wheel.
Create the Container together
Hear All the Voices
Hear an Essential Conversation from a Conversation Starter
Take that conversation into Creation via a Wisdom Circle (breakout group)
Have Community Circle
Close with a Commitment to [Positive] Action.
Who attends: Anyone who wants to step forward to make a positive impact in your family, community or organization.
Cost: Free/no charge. Contributions to support this initiative are welcome.
The Essential Conversations provide tools and practices to help you move from Fragile to Agile and from Reaction to Response
Purpose: Our weekly program of provocative and evocative conversations, interactive breakouts, and community conversations will inspire you and equip you with strategies, inspiration and ideas to create change and innovation needed to being coherence, resilience and positive impact.
We launched in March 2020 to activate leaders in response to the massive disruption we and the world were experiencing.
In community, with shared depth and intimacy, we discover resilience, love, and focus to stay present to what is needed each week. Through collaborative reflection, discover collaborative action towards positive impact.
Begin your week, in a community of support and collaboration, by setting your intention to have a positive impact and bring people together for the highest possible outcome of whatever you are engaged in.
The Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life prepares students in all fields of study for lifetimes of active citizenship. Tisch College promotes new knowledge in the field and applies this knowledge to evidence-based practice in programs, community partnerships, and advocacy efforts. Central to the university’s mission, the college offers Tufts’ students opportunities to engage in meaningful community building, civic and political experiences, and explore commitments to civic participation.
These researcher positions are open at Tisch:
Senior Researcher – CIRCLE, Tisch College
CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, is a non-partisan, independent research organization focused on youth civic engagement in the United States. We conduct extensive research on youth participation, and we leverage that research to improve opportunities for all young people to acquire and use the skills and knowledge they need to meaningfully participate in civic life. In all our work, we are especially concerned with understanding, addressing, and ultimately eliminating the systemic barriers that keep some young people marginalized from and underrepresented in civic life. Our research informs policy and practice and drive substantive change–whether in the classroom, state laws, the county clerk’s office, or the community organization–that promotes stronger youth development and a more inclusive and prosperous society.
Responsibilities include serving as the lead quantitative researcher on a range of research projects that may include strategies such as secondary data-analysis, large dataset creation/analysis, literature reviews, field experiments, and development of original surveys. The Senior Researcher’s tasks include producing analytic plans, methodology documentation, datasets, reports, fact sheets, formal and informal research briefings, often in close collaboration with CIRCLE colleagues. The Senior Researcher will assist with research grant proposal writing, especially with methodology and measurement sections. She/They/he will occasionally represent CIRCLE at conferences, practitioner forums, and press events. The Senior Researcher will collaborate with colleagues who represent multiple disciplines, backgrounds and positions and provide input and assistance, as well as peer training to other CIRCLE staff who produce and translate research (quantitative and qualitative). This staff member will report to the Director of CIRCLE (Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg), who reports to the Associate Dean of Tisch College, Diane Ryan.
The Cooperative Election Study (CES) is a large-scale academic election survey funded by the National Science Foundation and housed at Tufts University and Harvard University. The study is built on the collaboration of research teams from dozens of different academic institutions. Since its inception, the CES has involved more than 100 different research teams and hundreds of faculty and student researchers, and it has conducted interviews with over 400,000 American adults. The data from this project are used widely by researchers, journalists, and members of the public to understand American elections and public opinion.
THS IS A ONE-YEAR GRANT SUPPORTED TERM POSITION WITH NO CURRENT FUNDING FOR CONTINUATION. The Associate Researcher will assist with completing the data collection, organization, and analysis of data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study. The Associate Researcher will also aid the coordination of the project, the development of educational materials, the design and analysis of future surveys, and the dissemination of results. Among other things, the Associate Researcher will help to create the codebook and guide for the 2020 CES, will respond to request and inquiries from researchers and reporters wishing to use the data, and will collaborate with the principal investigators on analyzing data from the 2020 CES. The Associate Researcher will also have the opportunity to engage in collaborative academic research projects with the CES team. The Associate Researcher will report to the Principal Investigator (Professor Brian Schaffner), based on the Medford/Somerville Tufts University Campus. This is an ideal position for someone interested in gaining research experience in political science or survey research.
Basic Requirements:
REQUIRED:
Bachelor’s degree
Competency using statistical software such as R or Stata
Strong organizational and time management skills. Ability to manage multiple concurrent projects and competing deadlines
OTHER:
Project management skills
Strong oral and written communication skills
Demonstrated customer service or relationship management experience
Strong analytic and problem-solving skills
Ability to maintain attention to detail
Experience working with groups of people representing diverse identities and backgrounds
Preferred Qualifications:
Familiarity with Qualtrics software.
Experience analyzing public opinion data from surveys
Strong interest in American public opinion and survey methodology
This postdoctoral fellowship is offered in partnership with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation in Dayton, OH and involves some work at Kettering’s offices in Dayton as well as full-time employment at Tufts in the Boston area. The term is the 2021-22 academic year (June 1, 2021-May 31, 2022).
The Tisch College Civic Science initiative (https://tischcollege.tufts.edu/civic-studies/civic-science), led by Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Samantha Fried, aims to reframe the relationships among scientists and scientific institutions, institutions of higher education, the state, the media and the public. It also asks about the relationships and distinctions among those institutions, historically and today. With this context in mind, Civic Science seeks to…
Reconfigure the national conversation on divisive and complex issues that are both scientific and political in nature, thereby connecting scientific institutions, research, and publications to people’s values, beliefs, and choices.
Define and advance the public good in science, thereby finding ways for scientific institutions to better serve communities.
Explore the concept of knowledge as a commons (or common-pool resource), developing a line of work pioneered by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues
Develop curricula that simultaneously attend to scientific and civic issues and that teach students to understand and communicate both kinds of narratives together to a variety of audiences.
Develop approaches to democratic governance that are attuned to the role of the scientific enterprise in society.
Ask what it would mean to earn the trust of communities that have been historically marginalized by the institution of science, and what science would look like if this was a priority.
Intervene at institutional and grassroots levels, alongside a robust theoretical analysis.
A PhD is required. Applicants must also demonstrate a strong interest in investigating the intersections of science and civic matters as the focus of their postdoctoral year.
Civic Science is interdisciplinary, and this fellowship is open to specialists in any relevant field.
Qualifications
A scholar with a Ph.D. in any relevant discipline who is not yet tenured.
Desirable qualifications include, but are not limited to, the following:
A background, degree, or certificate in a STEM –– or STEM-adjacent –– field, OR
Work on strengthening, designing, or evaluating democratic processes, OR
A background in the Bloomington School approach to political economy and/or studies of common-pool resources, OR
A background in political science or political theory, OR
Previous work on the connections between community health and civic life, OR
A background in science, technology, and society (STS), OR
A background in critical theory, media studies, rhetoric, philosophy of science and technology, or science communication.
The ideal candidate may have more than one of these backgrounds.
The Postdoctoral Fellow will conduct research related to Civic Science, both independently and in collaboration with Peter Levine, Samantha Fried, and the Kettering Foundation. The Fellow may teach or co-teach one course to undergraduates in the Civic Studies Major. The Fellow will attend orientation and research meetings at the Kettering Foundation as requested.
Opens March 17, 2021 and will continue until the position is filled, or May 20. Questions about the position should be addressed to Dr. Peter Levine, Associate Dean of Tisch College at Peter.Levine@tufts.edu.
Non-Discrimination Statement: Our institution does not discriminate against job candidates on the basis of actual or perceived gender, gender identity, race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or religion. Tufts University, founded in 1852, prioritizes quality teaching, highly competitive basic and applied research and a commitment to active citizenship locally, regionally and globally. Tufts University also prides itself on creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community. Current and prospective employees of the university are expected to have and continuously develop skill in, and disposition for, positively engaging with a diverse population of faculty, staff, and students. Tufts University is an Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action Employer. We are committed to increasing the diversity of our faculty and staff and fostering their success when hired. Members of underrepresented groups are welcome and strongly encouraged to apply. If you are an applicant with a disability who is unable to use our online tools to search and apply for jobs, please contact us by calling Johny Laine in the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) at 617.627.3298 or at Johny.Laine@tufts.edu. Applicants can learn more about requesting reasonable accommodations at http://oeo.tufts.edu/.
Equal Employment Opportunity Statement: Tufts University, founded in 1852, prioritizes quality teaching, highly competitive basic and applied research, and a commitment to active citizenship locally, regionally, and globally. Tufts University also prides itself on creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community. Current and prospective employees of the university are expected to have and continuously develop skill in, and disposition for, positively engaging with a diverse population of faculty, staff, and students.
Tufts University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. We are committed to increasing the diversity of our faculty and staff and fostering their success when hired. Members of underrepresented groups are welcome and strongly encouraged to apply. See the University’s Non-Discrimination statement and policy here https://oeo.tufts.edu/policies-procedures/non-discrimination/. If you are an applicant with a disability who is unable to use our online tools to search and apply for jobs, please contact us by calling Johny Laine in the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) at 617-627-3298 or at johny.laine@tufts.edu. Applicants can learn more about requesting reasonable accommodations at http://oeo.tufts.edu.
Both of these speakers describe the context in which they’re speaking in order to support their goals or values. Even if they’re in the same place, both could be making valid points, because we can operate within several contexts at once. For instance, a classroom can be located within the United States.
These speakers are not completely free to describe their contexts as they wish. Unless the first speaker is actually located inside a school in which certain norms are commonly observed, that statement is odd–perhaps a joke or an idiosyncratic remark rather than an effective intervention. The first statement assumes a real, bricks-and-mortar building that has prevalent norms.
However, these statements are not completely determined by their objective context. They reflect choices: speakers can select which contexts to highlight and can identify preferred features of the contexts.
If many speakers make the same choices, they can influence the context. For instance, if teachers consistently say, “You can’t curse here,” the school may become a place where public cursing is rare. Teachers could decide to begin or to stop describing the school’s norms in that way. They are more influential than their students; as in most cases, power in unequally distributed. However, we only get the speech-context we want to the extent that the norms we advocate are actually observed. If teachers say, “We don’t talk that way here,” but everyone does anyway, they will begin to look foolish. In that sense, everyone influences the context, albeit to unequal degrees.
We can sometimes even use speech to create the context for speech, as in performative utterances like these:
— I call the meeting to order.
— Let us bow our heads in prayer.
(The second statement might change a secular gathering into a spiritual one for a time.)
I’ve recently learned that John J. Gumperz (1922-2013), a founder of interactional sociolinguistics, pioneered the idea that language has a dynamic, two-way interaction with social contexts. I look forward to learning more, especially about the political implications.
After all politics requires good conversation. The definition of good political talk is itself a matter of debate. Who must be included in each discussion? Must the discourse be civil? Must it be public-spirited? Must it aim at consensus? Must it be secular? What counts as appropriate evidence for empirical claims? Which emotions are valuable and when?
Contexts influence what forms of speech actually occur and prove effective. Political speech uttered in a church during a faith-based social movement will inevitably be different from political speech uttered in a faculty meeting, a union hall, or a courtroom. I am skeptical that we need just one type of speech. Pluralism is good.
Speech contexts are shaped by:
The implicit norms reflected in typical speech within each context. For example, if it is common to criticize other participants by name, then that is the norm.
Explicit characterizations of the context. “You really shouldn’t keep citing scripture here–most of us are not Christian” would be such a move. It describes the local norm as secular, and if people accept this description, it may affect their speech.
Other aspects of the institution: Who is permitted and/or recruited to participate? What behavior is rewarded? Who makes key decisions? Even literal architecture may matter. For instance, a bricks-and-mortar school probably consists of many rooms that are designed to hold one adult with 15-30 children or youth. Discourse would be different in a stadium, a prison, or along a forest trail.
We should envision speakers as operating in contexts that they may or may not endorse. At one level, they make ordinary points about what they believe or advocate. How they talk either conforms to the norms of the speech-context or violates them to some degree. Widespread violation can change the norms.
At another level, individuals may seek to change the speech-context, either by moving to another context (exit) or by seeking to alter its norms (voice). They can use their voice to advocate directly for different speech-norms, as in statements like, “Everyone is being too politically correct here–we must tolerate uncomfortable opinions.” Or they may use their voice to support changes in the institution that would likely change the norms. For instance, changing the demographic composition of a school or the balance of power between teachers and students might change the frequency of various forms of discourse in the school.
Discourse ethics is then not exhausted by the question: What kind of arguments should individuals make about policies and issues? It also encompasses questions about how to design, create, choose, and influence the contexts of speech, both directly and indirectly.
This is a mild critique of the idea that one kind of speech is desirable in a liberal democracy and that institutions should enact rights, rules, and procedures that encourage such speech. Instead, I am suggesting that people are embedded in diverse speech-contexts, which they also influence; such pluralism is desirable as well as inevitable; and people need ethical forms of voice and exit that they can use to affect their various speech-contexts.
Open government’s uncertain effects and the Biden opportunity: what now?
A review of 10 years of open government research reveals: 1) “a transparency-driven focus”, 2) “methodological concerns”, and 3) [maybe not surprising] “the lack of empirical evidence regarding the effects of open government”. My take on this is that these findings are, somewhat, self-reinforcing.
First, the early focus on transparency by open government advocates, while ignoring the conditions under which transparency could lead to public goods, should be, in part, to blame. This is even more so if open government interventions insist on tactical, instead of strategicapproaches to accountability. Second, the fact that many of those engaging in open government efforts do not take into account the existing evidence doesn’t help in terms of designing appropriate reforms, nor in terms of calibrating expectations. Proof of this is the recurrent and mostly unsubstantiated spiel that “transparency leads to trust”, voiced by individuals and organizations who should have known better. Third, should there be any effects of open government reforms, these are hard to verify in a credible manner given that evaluations often suffer from methodological weaknesses, as indicated by the paper.
Finally, open government’s semantic extravaganza makes building critical mass all the more difficult. For example, I have my doubts over whether the paper would reach similar conclusions should it have expanded the review to open government practices that, in the literature, are not normally labeled as open government. This would be the case, for instance, of participatory budgeting (which has shown to improve service delivery and increase tax revenues), or strategic approaches to social accountability that present substantial results in terms of development outcomes.
In any case, the research findings are still troubling. The election of President Biden gives some extra oxygen to the open government agenda, and that is great news. But in a context where autocratization turns viral, making a dent in how governments operate will take less policy-based evidence searching and more evidence-based strategizing. That involves leveraging the existing evidence when it is available, and when it is not, the standard path applies: more research is needed.
Open Government Partnership and Justice
On another note, Joe Foti, from the Open Government Partnership (OGP), writes on the need to engage more lawyers, judges and advocates in order to increase the number of accountability-focused OGP commitments. I particularly like Joe’s ideas on bringing these actors together to identify where OGP commitments could be stronger, and how. This resonates with a number of cases I’ve come across in the past where the judiciary played a key role in ensuring that citizens’ voice also had teeth.
I also share Joe’s enthusiasm for the potential of a new generation of commitments that put forward initiatives such as specialized anti-corruption courts and anti-SLAPP provisions. Having said this, the judiciary itself needs to be open, independent and capable. In most countries that I’ve worked in, a good part of open government reforms fail precisely because of a dysfunctional judiciary system.
Diversity, collective intelligence and deliberative democracy
Part of the justification for models of deliberative democracy is their epistemic quality, that is, large and diverse crowds are smarter than the (elected or selected) few. A good part of this argument finds its empirical basis in the fantastic work by Scott Page.
But that’s not all. We know, for instance, that gender diversity on corporate boards improves firms’ performance, ethnic diversity produces more impactful scientific research, diverse groups are better at solving crimes, popular juries are less biased than professional judges, and politically diverse editorial teams produce higher-quality Wikipedia articles. Diversity also helps to explain classical Athens’ striking superiority vis-à-vis other city-states of its time, due to the capacity of its democratic system to leverage the dispersed knowledge of its citizens through sortition.
Now, a Nature article, “Algorithmic and human prediction of success in human collaboration from visual features”, presents new evidence of the power of diversity in problem-solving tasks. In the paper, the authors examine the patterns of group success in Escape The Room, an adventure game in which a group attempts to escape a maze by collectively solving a series of puzzles. The authors find that groups that are larger, older and more gender diverse are significantly more likely to escape. But there’s an exception to that: more age diverse groups are less likely to escape. Intriguing isn’t it?
Deliberative processes online: rough review of the evidence
As the pandemic pushes more deliberative exercises online, researchers and practitioners start to take more seriously the question of how effective online deliberation can be when compared to in-person processes. Surprisingly, there are very few empirical studies comparing the two methods.
But a quick run through the literature offers some interesting insights. For instance, an online 2004 deliberative poll on U.S. foreign policy, and a traditional face-to-face deliberative poll conducted in parallel, presented remarkably similar results. A 2007 experiment comparing online and face-to-face deliberation found that both approaches can increase participants’ issue knowledge, political efficacy, and willingness to participate in politics. A similar comparison from 2009 looking at deliberation over the construction of a power plant in Finland found considerable resemblance in the outcomes of online and face-to-face processes. A study published in 2012 on waste treatment in France found that, compared to the offline process, online deliberation was more likely to: i) increase women’s interventions, ii) promote the justification or arguments, and iii) be oriented towards the common good (although in this case the processes were not similar in design).
The external validity of these findings, however encouraging they may be, remains an empirical question. Particularly given that since these studies were conducted the technology used to support deliberations has in many cases changed (e.g. from written to “zoomified” deliberations). Anyhow, kudos should go to the researchers who started engaging with the subject well over a decade ago: if that work was a niche subject then, their importance now is blatantly obvious.
(BTW, on a related issue, here’s a fascinating 2021 experiment examining whether online juries can make consistent, repeatable decisions: interestingly, deliberating groups are much more consistent than non-deliberating groups)
Fixing the Internet?
Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev published a great article in The Atlantic on the challenges to democracy by an Internet model that fuels disinformation and polarization, presenting alternative paths to address this. I was thankful for the opportunity to make a modest contribution to such a nice piece.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned about the effects of the Internet in politics. For instance, a new study in the American Political Science Review finds that radical right parties benefit more than any other parties from malicious bots on social media.
Open democracy
2021 continues to be a good year for the proponents of deliberative democracy, with growing coverage of the subject in the mainstream media, in part fueled by the recent launch of Helène Landemore’s great book “Open Democracy.” Looking for something to listen to? Look no further and listen to this interview by Ezra Klein with Helène.
A dialogue among giants
The recording of the roundtable Contours of Participatory Democracy in the 21st Century is now available. The conversation between Jane Mansbridge, Mark Warren and Cristina Lafont can be found here.
Democracy and design thinking
Speaking of giants, the new book by Michael Saward “Democratic Design”, is finally out. I’m a big fan of Michael’s work, so my recommendation may be biased. In this new book Michael brings design thinking together with democratic theory and practice. If the design of democratic institutions is one of your topics, you should definitely check it out!
Civic Tech
I was thrilled to have the opportunity to deliver a lecture at the Center for Collective Learning – Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute. My presentation, Civic Technologies: Past, Present and Future, can be found here.
Scholar articles:
And finally, for those who really want to geek-out, a list of 15 academic articles I enjoyed reading:
Modern Grantmaking: That’s the title of a new book by Gemma Bull and Tom Steinberg. I had the privilege of reading snippets of this, and I can already recommend it not only to those working with grantmaking, but also pretty much anyone working in the international development space.
Lectures: The Center for Collective Learning has a fantastic line-up of lectures open to the public. Find out more here.
Learning from Togo: While unemployment benefits websites were crashing in the US, the Togolese government showed how to leverage mobile money and satellite data to effectively get cash into the hands of those who need it the most
Nudging the nudgers: British MPs are criticising academics for sending them fictitious emails for research. I wonder if part of their outrage is not just about the emails, but about what the study could reveal in terms of their actual responsiveness to different constituencies.
DataViz: Bringing data visualization to physical/offline spaces has been an obsession of mine for quite a while. I was happy to come across this project while doing some research for a presentation
According to CNBC, “Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey said the company has always been against legislation in Georgia that restricts voter access, but is choosing to speak up publicly about it after the bill passed.” Coca-Cola has received public criticism for not opposing the law and may face a boycott. Quincey claims that his company worked privately against the law. “Now that it’s passed, we’re coming out more publicly,” he said.
I wouldn’t expect big companies to improve democratic institutions. It’s not clear that they benefit from more equitable democracy or more responsive government, nor is it appropriate for them to use their power to influence the rules of the game more than they do now.
However, the literature on what causes democracies to devolve into autocracies emphasizes the importance of “guardrails”: lines that political actors should know they must never cross. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt emphasize “constitutional forbearance” and “mutual toleration.”* Forbearance means refraining from using all the powers that the written text of the constitution affords you. Regimes rarely survive once politicians routinely ignore the spirit of the rules. Toleration means explicitly acknowledging that the other side has a legitimate place in politics, a right to its views, and a right to govern if it wins elections. Crossing such lines without repercussions can cause the whole system to fail.
Big business could play a role in preserving these guardrails. Businesses benefit from the stability, openness, and accountability provided by a functioning republic. Without meddling excessively in public institutions or ignoring their own interests, businesses could stand up for core principles that preserve the basic constitutional order.
But exactly what are those principles, and when are they violated?
In my view, Georgia broke through a guardrail when it passed its new election law. It should have to pay a price so that similar bills do not pass elsewhere. However, my claim is not self-evident. Legislatures constantly change voting laws for better or worse, and most of their choices are matters for debate and disagreement within the democratic process. The consequences may be serious–but we should expect that, because the consequences of governance are serious. Laws often cause people to live or die.
To show that a given law crosses a line that imperils democracy requires clearly articulated principles. Your own principles can be very demanding–if you like–because you are a free individual who is entitled to your opinions and even obliged to express them if you care about them. You could even argue that failure to implement universal automatic voter registration violates democratic principles.
In contrast, a company’s principles regarding democracy probably will not be very demanding. I might actually prefer that corporations stick to core values and not pretend to be advocates for a better political system.
Articulating core principles in advance would warn political actors not to cross certain lines. It would also make companies’ behavior seem less arbitrary. Quincey, the Coca-Cola CEO, said his “company has a long track record in Georgia … of working with legislators and lobbying for itself or with alliances and achieving what it wants while working in private.” He wants us to believe that Coca-Cola tried to make Georgia’s law better. But a lack of publicly articulated principles makes that claim impossible to assess–and rather dubious.
It’s easy to envision activists pushing Coca-Cola to take positions on subtler voting-law issues, while other customers would counter-mobilize against perceived voter fraud or reforms championed by Democrats. If the company does not articulate its principles in advance, it has no defense.
Writing such principles would not be easy. They could be too vague to distinguish norm-busting laws, or too concrete and precise to cover unanticipated policies, such as Georgia’s provision that bans serving water on voting lines. (Who would have foreseen that?) But I think that companies could help democracy if they articulated core principles, and they should do so in their own enlightened self-interest. After all, they depend on the survival of the republic.
*e.g., How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Cf. Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy by Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman.
Unlike most academic fields, Community Economies is highly transdisciplinary and socially committed. In fact, it is formally dedicated to “ethical economic practices that acknowledge and act on the interdependence of all life forms, human and nonhuman.”
It also rejects some premises of standard economics, highlighting instead the vast amounts of informal, off-the-books work that is not necessarily monetized or intended for the market. This takes many forms, as the Community Economies “iceberg” image (below) helps illustrate. Even though parenting, community life, care work, gift economies, barter, vernacular culture, and many other form of life are productive and valuable, economists generally dismiss these as trivial or uninteresting. After all, there is no market associated with them and no money changing hands.
To get a better understanding of Community Economies and the work of both CEI and CERN, I recently interviewed Professor Katherine Gibson of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, in Australia, for my Frontiers of Commoning podcast, Episode #13.
Gibson is famous for developing -- along with Julie Graham, the geography professor at UMass Amherst who died in 2010 – the very idea of “diverse economies.” It is meant as a counterpoint to capitalism without being derivative of the capitalist worldview and epistemology.
Under the joint byline J.K. Gibson-Graham, the two wrote such books as The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of the Political Economy (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics (2006), and Take Bake the Economy (with Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy) (2013).
Much of the work of the 300-plus CERN researchers around the world is devoted to bringing “invisible” parts of the economy into the daylight. This consists of treatises on such topics as the Solidarity Economy, degrowth, co-operatives, community finance, local trading systems, underground markets, open source software, and commoning, among other topics.
Just recently, I caught a lecture by CERN member Caroline Shenaz Hossein on the self-organized social finance systems known as ROSCAs, or Rotating Savings and Credit Associations, which are informal cooperatives of Black diaspora women in the Caribbean, North America, and elsewhere. ROSCAs, which go by many different names in different countries, help their participants amass capital for starting a business, buying a car, or paying college tuition for their children. The “Banker Ladies,” as Shenaz Hossein calls them, amount to a hidden social system for meeting financial needs that are mostly ignored by the formal, capitalist banking system.
A primary goal of the Community Economies literature is to “decenter” capitalism as the reference point for thinking about alternative economic projects. Why must everything be seen through the normative lens of capitalism? So, among CEI and CERN researchers, the overriding goal is to shine a light on the actual diversity of community-based projects unfolding everywhere -- inconspicuously, locally – and to understand them on their own terms.
Venturing into these unconventional forms helps us transform how we might think in fresh ways about the whole cultural construct known as “the economy.” After all, “the economy” is about much more than the stock market, GDP, the Federal Reserve, and the mainstream (capitalist) policy.
Professor Katherine Gibson
“The attention given to a monolithic capitalism belies the diversity of economic activities,” explains Gibson. “There is something going on with the representation of economies that allows for certain activities to be highlighted and thus valued, and others to be made less visible.”
As one reviewer of A Postcapitalist Politics put it, Gibson-Graham “rejects the idea that capitalist economies are tightly organized systems” and instead presents the economy as consisting of “many different undertakings, only some of which cluster around market transactions.”
It also follows that the potential for change starts with us, as embodied selves, not with distant political or economic institutions. Consider Gibson-Graham’s line in The End of Capitalism:
But what sense is there in denying the ample evidence that people have the capacity to experience extraordinary joy and pleasure in working with each other simply because they are working together: the giddy sensation that one is smaller than what one thought (a part of a whole) and larger than what one is (stripped of individual fetters), that one has become folded, along with others, into a new creature altogether.
I’ve also loved the memorable line by Gibson-Graham: “If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies.”
That’s the kind of sentiment that arises from feminist economics, with its attention to our living bodies and relationships. It’s the kind of idea that comes from scholars who want to study the real world, and avoid arid economic abstractions that are losing their explanatory power with each passing week as capitalist crises proliferate.
My Frontiers of Commoning podcast interview with Katherine Gibson can be accessed here.
Unlike most academic fields, Community Economies is highly transdisciplinary and socially committed. In fact, it is formally dedicated to “ethical economic practices that acknowledge and act on the interdependence of all life forms, human and nonhuman.”
It also rejects some premises of standard economics, highlighting instead the vast amounts of informal, off-the-books work that is not necessarily monetized or intended for the market. This takes many forms, as the Community Economies “iceberg” image (below) helps illustrate. Even though parenting, community life, care work, gift economies, barter, vernacular culture, and many other form of life are productive and valuable, economists generally dismiss these as trivial or uninteresting. After all, there is no market associated with them and no money changing hands.
To get a better understanding of Community Economies and the work of both CEI and CERN, I recently interviewed Professor Katherine Gibson of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, in Australia, for my Frontiers of Commoning podcast, Episode #13.
Gibson is famous for developing -- along with Julie Graham, the geography professor at UMass Amherst who died in 2010 – the very idea of “diverse economies.” It is meant as a counterpoint to capitalism without being derivative of the capitalist worldview and epistemology.
Under the joint byline J.K. Gibson-Graham, the two wrote such books as The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of the Political Economy (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics (2006), and Take Bake the Economy (with Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy) (2013).
Much of the work of the 300-plus CERN researchers around the world is devoted to bringing “invisible” parts of the economy into the daylight. This consists of treatises on such topics as the Solidarity Economy, degrowth, co-operatives, community finance, local trading systems, underground markets, open source software, and commoning, among other topics.
Just recently, I caught a lecture by CERN member Caroline Shenaz Hossein on the self-organized social finance systems known as ROSCAs, or Rotating Savings and Credit Associations, which are informal cooperatives of Black diaspora women in the Caribbean, North America, and elsewhere. ROSCAs, which go by many different names in different countries, help their participants amass capital for starting a business, buying a car, or paying college tuition for their children. The “Banker Ladies,” as Shenaz Hossein calls them, amount to a hidden social system for meeting financial needs that are mostly ignored by the formal, capitalist banking system.
A primary goal of the Community Economies literature is to “decenter” capitalism as the reference point for thinking about alternative economic projects. Why must everything be seen through the normative lens of capitalism? So, among CEI and CERN researchers, the overriding goal is to shine a light on the actual diversity of community-based projects unfolding everywhere -- inconspicuously, locally – and to understand them on their own terms.
Venturing into these unconventional forms helps us transform how we might think in fresh ways about the whole cultural construct known as “the economy.” After all, “the economy” is about much more than the stock market, GDP, the Federal Reserve, and the mainstream (capitalist) policy.
Professor Katherine Gibson
“The attention given to a monolithic capitalism belies the diversity of economic activities,” explains Gibson. “There is something going on with the representation of economies that allows for certain activities to be highlighted and thus valued, and others to be made less visible.”
As one reviewer of A Postcapitalist Politics put it, Gibson-Graham “rejects the idea that capitalist economies are tightly organized systems” and instead presents the economy as consisting of “many different undertakings, only some of which cluster around market transactions.”
It also follows that the potential for change starts with us, as embodied selves, not with distant political or economic institutions. Consider Gibson-Graham’s line in The End of Capitalism:
But what sense is there in denying the ample evidence that people have the capacity to experience extraordinary joy and pleasure in working with each other simply because they are working together: the giddy sensation that one is smaller than what one thought (a part of a whole) and larger than what one is (stripped of individual fetters), that one has become folded, along with others, into a new creature altogether.
I’ve also loved the memorable line by Gibson-Graham: “If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies.”
That’s the kind of sentiment that arises from feminist economics, with its attention to our living bodies and relationships. It’s the kind of idea that comes from scholars who want to study the real world, and avoid arid economic abstractions that are losing their explanatory power with each passing week as capitalist crises proliferate.
My Frontiers of Commoning podcast interview with Katherine Gibson can be accessed here.
Unlike most academic fields, Community Economies is highly transdisciplinary and socially committed. In fact, it is formally dedicated to “ethical economic practices that acknowledge and act on the interdependence of all life forms, human and nonhuman.”
It also rejects some premises of standard economics, highlighting instead the vast amounts of informal, off-the-books work that is not necessarily monetized or intended for the market. This takes many forms, as the Community Economies “iceberg” image (below) helps illustrate. Even though parenting, community life, care work, gift economies, barter, vernacular culture, and many other form of life are productive and valuable, economists generally dismiss these as trivial or uninteresting. After all, there is no market associated with them and no money changing hands.
To get a better understanding of Community Economies and the work of both CEI and CERN, I recently interviewed Professor Katherine Gibson of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, in Australia, for my Frontiers of Commoning podcast, Episode #13.
Gibson is famous for developing -- along with Julie Graham, the geography professor at UMass Amherst who died in 2010 – the very idea of “diverse economies.” It is meant as a counterpoint to capitalism without being derivative of the capitalist worldview and epistemology.
Under the joint byline J.K. Gibson-Graham, the two wrote such books as The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of the Political Economy (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics (2006), and Take Bake the Economy (with Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy) (2013).
Much of the work of the 300-plus CERN researchers around the world is devoted to bringing “invisible” parts of the economy into the daylight. This consists of treatises on such topics as the Solidarity Economy, degrowth, co-operatives, community finance, local trading systems, underground markets, open source software, and commoning, among other topics.
Just recently, I caught a lecture by CERN member Caroline Shenaz Hossein on the self-organized social finance systems known as ROSCAs, or Rotating Savings and Credit Associations, which are informal cooperatives of Black diaspora women in the Caribbean, North America, and elsewhere. ROSCAs, which go by many different names in different countries, help their participants amass capital for starting a business, buying a car, or paying college tuition for their children. The “Banker Ladies,” as Shenaz Hossein calls them, amount to a hidden social system for meeting financial needs that are mostly ignored by the formal, capitalist banking system.
A primary goal of the Community Economies literature is to “decenter” capitalism as the reference point for thinking about alternative economic projects. Why must everything be seen through the normative lens of capitalism? So, among CEI and CERN researchers, the overriding goal is to shine a light on the actual diversity of community-based projects unfolding everywhere -- inconspicuously, locally – and to understand them on their own terms.
Venturing into these unconventional forms helps us transform how we might think in fresh ways about the whole cultural construct known as “the economy.” After all, “the economy” is about much more than the stock market, GDP, the Federal Reserve, and the mainstream (capitalist) policy.
Professor Katherine Gibson
“The attention given to a monolithic capitalism belies the diversity of economic activities,” explains Gibson. “There is something going on with the representation of economies that allows for certain activities to be highlighted and thus valued, and others to be made less visible.”
As one reviewer of A Postcapitalist Politics put it, Gibson-Graham “rejects the idea that capitalist economies are tightly organized systems” and instead presents the economy as consisting of “many different undertakings, only some of which cluster around market transactions.”
It also follows that the potential for change starts with us, as embodied selves, not with distant political or economic institutions. Consider Gibson-Graham’s line in The End of Capitalism:
But what sense is there in denying the ample evidence that people have the capacity to experience extraordinary joy and pleasure in working with each other simply because they are working together: the giddy sensation that one is smaller than what one thought (a part of a whole) and larger than what one is (stripped of individual fetters), that one has become folded, along with others, into a new creature altogether.
I’ve also loved the memorable line by Gibson-Graham: “If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies.”
That’s the kind of sentiment that arises from feminist economics, with its attention to our living bodies and relationships. It’s the kind of idea that comes from scholars who want to study the real world, and avoid arid economic abstractions that are losing their explanatory power with each passing week as capitalist crises proliferate.
My Frontiers of Commoning podcast interview with Katherine Gibson can be accessed here.
