The current issue of Public, the on-line journal of Imagining America, a consortium of universities and cultural organizations dedicated to strengthening the public and democratic roles of arts, humanities, and design, includes a conversation I had with Carlton Turner, head of Alternate ROOTS, a cultural organization, facilitated by Erica Kohl-Arenas, an activist-scholar at New School, "Working the Frontlines of Imagination and Civic Education."

The conversation and debate - Turner and I had different views of the role of art in social change, although we found areas of agreement as the conversation proceeded -- prompted me to think about two different concepts of public art. Public art, including a variety of forms of cultural production such as storytelling, aims to have public impact in the world.

Public art often protests injustice and oppression, seeking to raise public awareness. Pablo Picasso's famous painting Guernica, finished in 1937, is an example. As Wikipedia describes the painting,

"The large mural shows the suffering of people, animals, and buildings wrenched by violence and chaos." Depicting bombing of a Basque village in northern Spain by German and Italian planes, "Guernica was displayed around the world...and believed to have helped bring worldwide attention to the Spanish Civil War."

There is another kind of public art aimed at stimulating collective power, or civic agency. The two kinds are often mixed, but the aim is usually more one than the other.

Public narrative, in the sense of the concept developed by civil rights activist, community and labor union organizer turned Harvard professor Marshall Ganz and used in the Obama campaign in 2008, is a powerful example of public art aimed at developing civic agency. It has since become a resource for change-making around the world.

Narrative, writes Ganz, is the process "through which individuals, communities, and nations make choices, construct identity, and inspire action. It can both instruct and inspire - teaching us not only how we ought to act but motivating us to act." Public narrative is different than an individual story. "Some of us may think our personal stories don't matter," says Ganz. But "if we do public work we have a responsibility to give a public account of ourselves - where we came from, why we do what we do, and where we think we are going." Ganz told me that the telling of the story, and the experiences of being deeply understood and of having an impact, are crucial ingredients. Indeed such energizing interactions are the point.

Public narrative has three parts - "story of self," "story of us," "story of now."

Story of self: Story of self tells of formative experiences which shaped you, "communicating the values that are calling you to act." Story of self is built around one or two key "choice points," moments of large consequence when one faced a challenge of some kind, made a choice based on core values, experienced a consequence, and learned something of importance -- "a moral."

We have found in our work through the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship that one of the most powerful effects of public narrative comes from having young people, especially from difficult circumstances, focus on choices they have made. As Natasha Moore, one of my students who often trains young people in public narrative, wrote in a paper,

"When people have had no control over the negative things that happened to them, it's hard to recognize the power they do have...by forcing people to think about decisions they have made that changed their life, it allows them to see that they do have some control over their circumstances and who they will become."

Story of us: Story of self connects with story of us. There are many "us's" - family, community, college, movement, nation. A story of us tells the lived values of a community, long formed or now forming. It can also help to constitute a community, helping develop distinctive collective identity. Stories of us with depth have founding moments, key choices, challenges faced, defining experiences, lessons learned.

Story of now: Story of now locates the community in challenges of the time. An example was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech on August 28, 1963. It is important to remember that King combined his energizing message with a fierce protest against the failure of America to make good on the "promissory note" to African Americans.

There was another element: the strategic thought given to how the speech and the march could communicate with and energize broad audiences. The March on Washington, King's public stage, was designed by organizer Bayard Rustin to gain support from Middle Americans, for whom civil rights was not a central concern.

Two biblical stories illustrate the two types of public art. The Moses or Exodus narrative is the struggle against oppression, in which agency is largely located in God and Moses. By way of contrast, as Marie-Louise Ström and I described in an earlier blog, "Wilderness Politics," the Wilderness narrative tells the story of the struggle to build the institutions, governance structures, and rules, norms and habits of a way of life. The wilderness narrative is productive, difficult, and messy. People kept refusing agency and wanting to go back into Egypt. It is also a dramatic example of "the story of us."

Another biblical public art narrative aimed at agency is the Nehemiah story of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. As the people rebuilt the walls they also rebuilt themselves as a people. Within Nehemiah is a struggle against injustice, describing the nobles who were ripping off the people and how an assembly of the people held them to account. But this struggle takes place within a larger story of reconstruction. Both Wilderness and Nehemiah aim to educate and energize.

Recognizing -- "seeing" -- public art that aims to build civic agency can be conceived as a new frontier of interpretive cultural analysis. Seeing and creating such art is also urgently needed in our time, when fatalism is widespread.

Public art which aims at building civic agency can generate hope.

Public art often protests injustice and oppression, seeking to raise public awareness. Pablo Picasso's famous painting Guernica, finished in 1937, is an example.

Public art often protests injustice and oppression, seeking to raise public awareness. Pablo Picasso's famous painting Guernica, finished in 1937, is an example.

Mike Miller, long time organizer and intellectual leader in community organizing, and Aaron Schultz, a theorist of the field who also is a practitioner, have edited a collection entitled People Power: The Community Organizing Tradition of Saul Alinsky (Vanderbilt University Press). Like the recent death of Ed Chambers, director of the Industrial Areas Foundation community organizing network which Alinsky founded, the book prompts reflection on the strengths and limits of community organizing and also on "what comes next?"

The book describes Alinsky's methods and those of associates who adopted and modified his approach, including Fred Ross, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta in the United Farm Workers, Chambers, Nicholas Von Hoffman, Dick Harmon, Ernie Cortes, and Johnny Ray Youngblood in IAF, Wade Rathke of ACORN, and Heather Booth of the Midwest Academy, among others.

"When people are organized, they move to the central decision-making table...on the basis of power," Alinsky said in a 1969 interview. "[They] say, 'We are people and damn it you are going to listen to us." This idea comes through all the variations. As Miller and Schutz put it, "Community organizing brings powerless and relatively powerless people together in solidarity to defend and advance their interests and values" (p. 2).

Through community organizing millions of people in the US and other countries have developed hope and power. I greatly appreciate this collection and its wisdom. At the same time, People's Power highlights how much we need to open up for work, debate, discussion, exploration new approaches and strategies for democratizing change in institutional and professional life.

Education, government, businesses, health, the media and cultural institutions like museums, historical societies, orchestras, dance and theater groups and associated professions need to be re-imagined as human creations which can be re-created in democratic terms. This means a shift from seeing them simply as "targets," in the language of organizers. But it is easier said than done.

Miller, in his introductory piece, contrasts community organizing with "elite democracy," based on elections, and "strong democracy," based on participatory governance mechanisms like advisory groups. Community organizing, he says, is part of "'civil society democracy' which emphasizes the importance of voluntary associations outside the formal structures of government...without a vibrant and strong civil society, money and the self-perpetuation of elites will be the controlling factors in government" (p. 42).

There are reasons for the map. Schutz in an essay in Educational Theory, "Power and Trust in the Public Realm" (2011), compares the "power-building" methods of community organizing with what he sees as the idealized and apolitical approach of progressives like John Dewey who sought to create democratic schools. Schutz argues the latter reflected "experiences of restrained dialogue in the new middle-class realms of the college seminar, professional association, and emerging forms of child-rearing" (p. 491).

Schutz argues that "almost universally, progressives [like Dewey]...avoided dealing with the challenges created by the painful, messy, dirty, conflictual, interest-driven, and antagonistic realities" of public life (p. 493). He quotes two teachers in Dewey's famous Laboratory School, Katherine Mayhew and Anna Edwards, who observed that graduates, trained in collaboration, experienced "shock and conflict" when they attempted "to use intelligent action for social purposes" and found themselves "thwarted and balked by the competitive antisocial spirit and dominant selfishness in society" (p. 496).

Community organizers like Schutz have insight into the limits of social change strategies which avoid politics. But their model flattens "power" into a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources. As Schutz argues, "significant social changes...are usually concerned with disagreements over the distribution of limited resources" (p. 503).

Community organizers see two main forms of power, people and money. "Knowledge power," if noted at all, is seen as abstracted from human relationships. Thus Alinsky in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals declared that "Our alleged educational system...[produces people] trained to emphasize order, logic, rational thought, direction, and purpose. . . . [with] a structured, static, closed, rigid, mental makeup" (166).

Alinsky had shrewd insights, but his fatalism about change in knowledge-based systems is disastrous.

Expert-led knowledge power is on the march, embodied in "Big Data," predictive technologies, and movements like translational science. All seek to fix people and problems from the outside, and view everyday citizens as largely ignorant and passive.

As Peter Levine, a leader in the emerging field of civic studies, observes, "impersonal politics" - another name for expert-led or technocratic power - contrasts with the "relational politics" of community organizing. Technocratic politics is delivered from the outside; it is abstract; its purveyors ask "what should be done?" by experts, rather than, as fellow citizens, "what should we do?" When it displaces relational politics, it dis-empowers most knowledge workers themselves. As long time organizer Gerald Taylor has observed, professionals are losing their autonomy and power in many fields.

"Only in relationships can we learn from other people," concludes Levine, "build networks that are sources of power and capacity, and act with agency..[and] seriously ask the question 'What should we do?'" Dewey, despite his aversion to rough and tumble politics, has much to offer here. He understood that knowledge power is not zero-sum but is increased through sharing transactions, calling this "social" knowledge. Though practitioners have to be clear eyed about conflicting interests and structures of unaccountable power in ways which go beyond Dewey, a democratic politics of knowledge also requires organizing broad alliances, making work practices more public, interactive, filled with meaning and developing new public narratives about the democratic possibilities of institutions. This approach is far different than targeting enemies and issue campaigns, the stock and trade of community organizing.

In 1946, Alinsky wrote that "the world is deluged with panaceas, formulas, proposed laws, machineries, ways out, and myriads of solutions." He argued that these displace "the eternal truth of the democratic faith that the solution always lies with the people" (p. 40).

As technocratic politics becomes transformed by a relational politics of civic agency, we will see a rebirth of the democratic faith.

Harry Boyte edits the recent book collection, also from Vanderbilt University Press, Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities, with many stories of institutional and professional democratization.

Expert-led knowledge power is on the march, embodied in "Big Data," predictive technologies, and movements like translational science. All seek to fix people and problems from the outside, and view everyday citizens as largely ignorant and passive.

Expert-led knowledge power is on the march, embodied in "Big Data," predictive technologies, and movements like translational science. All seek to fix people and problems from the outside, and view everyday citizens as largely ignorant and passive.

Recently, Thomas Ehrlich, former president of Indiana University, co-founder of Campus Compact and a key figure in the higher education engagement movement, with his young colleague, Ernestine Fu, wrote in Forbes magazine about recent attacks in Arizona, Wisconsin and North Carolina on higher education.

In all three cases, those slashing funding for public higher education and the firing of a public university president of a different political party claimed that politics has nothing to do with their decisions. But this is hard to swallow. Rather, it appears that proponents of these actions are part of a growing band of politicians who want partisan politics to shape public higher education. In doing so, they refuse to acknowledge that nonpartisan preparation for democracy is an essential task of colleges and universities.

A recent trip to the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and Campus Compact at Elon brought home to me the potential for higher education to respond to these attacks in constructive ways, moving from the defense to a public mission which can engage the broad majority of Americans. North Carolina is at the center of current controversies. Tom Ross, the president of the University of North Carolina, was recently fired by the system's board, reportedly for political reasons.

To respond effectively requires moving beyond partisan politics to reinvigorate aims far larger than education as simply a path for individual success. It also means a much bigger view of democracy, now usually seen as elections. And, finally, it points to a crucial strategy: A movement to strengthen higher education's capacity to create and catalyze public spaces in classrooms, on campuses and beyond them, which connects disconnected worlds of private life and public life, where people of different partisan views, interests and backgrounds can find common ground.

Here, it is worth recalling that public universities, as they adapted to the modern world, had much this mission. James Angell, president of the University of Michigan at the turn of the last century, believed that UM needed to embody and help shape the dynamics of the changing democracy with a "democratic atmosphere" full of debate, discussion, experimentalism, the play of different views and wide engagement with the society. William James (Harvard), founder of experimental psychology, urged scientific approaches to understanding human behavior based on science as democratic practices -- cooperative, open inquiry, free exchange of ideas and testing of ideas in practice, not "value-free" methods. A democratic view of higher education's purpose was central to President Truman's Commission on Higher Education in 1947.

Meanwhile, it is also important to remember that a view of education's purpose as cultivating the capacities to work across differences means democracy as a way of life, not simply elections. The view once voiced by Jane Addams that education should "free the powers" of each person and connect them to the larger democracy was widely shared. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King described the Civil Rights Movement as bringing the country "back to the great wells of democracy." Students called for "participatory democracy" everywhere, including schools and colleges.

We need many stories in this vein, especially stories led by students, about the work of actually building and sustaining public spaces. These stories are present, but they are now overshadowed by news about students' negative behavior, from racism to sexual violence.

Public spaces allow for expressions of higher education's best democratic values -- free exchange of ideas, thoughtful discussion, appeal to evidence and respect for different perspectives. Such spaces can engage people's private interests and identities -- "private worlds" of personal stories, subjective experiences, identity politics and the like -- and bring them into a larger public context. They also can engage the public world of "Big Data" and "evidence-based solutions" in ways that ground such knowledge production in relational public cultures, transforming the detached informational cultures based on abstraction about human beings which have come to dominate in expert systems.

In North Carolina at UNCG and Campus Compact, I was struck by the strong and positive faculty responses to concepts of deliberative practices around issues like "the changing world of work." There was much interest in new developments in complexity science such as infant development science and Executive Function, which emphasize the central importance of human agency to children's flourishing. Faculty, students, staff and community members expressed enthusiasm for the concept of public spaces which help to build civic agency, people's capacities to work across differences on common challenges.

Such spaces are not about harmony. They are full of tensions, negotiated truths and different kinds of evidence. They require "lowering the temperature" of public discussion, and developing skills of listening and working together. They also help people break out of their bubbles.

I came away convinced that a movement for public spaces is possible and that higher education is central to its development. Such a movement can revive the "democratic atmosphere" at the center of a democratic way of life. Remembering this idea of democracy and revitalizing its atmosphere have never been more important.

Harry Boyte is editor of Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities, recently published by Vanderbilt University Press.