Survey by Tufts University researchers also finds 42% of Latinos and 27% of Whites know victims of police mistreatment

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (June 17, 2020)—Sixty-eight percent of African Americans say they know someone who has been unfairly stopped, searched, questioned, physically threatened or abused by the police, and 43 percent say they personally have had this experience—with 22 percent saying the mistreatment occurred within the past year alone, according to survey results from Tufts University’s Research Group on Equity in Health, Wealth and Civic Engagement.

Forty-two percent of Latinos and 27 percent of Whites also say they know someone who was unfairly stopped by police, with 23 percent of Latinos and 13 percent of Whites reporting that they personally have had these experiences.

The nationally representative survey of adults, conducted between May 29 and June 10, also looked at other forms of discrimination, and found that, in all types except one, higher percentages of African Americans report being subjected to discrimination than other groups. The survey was designed and analyzed by Tufts University’s Research Group on Equity in Health, Wealth and Civic Engagement.

“Some people might think that day-to-day discrimination happens primarily during routine interactions, such as shopping. But one of the eye-opening results of our survey is that Black people are about as likely to report being stopped unfairly by police as they are to encounter discrimination in a store or in other interactions,” said Deborah J. Schildkraut, professor and chair of Political Science in Tufts’ School of Arts and Sciences.

Although African Americans are 3.3 times more likely than Whites to report that they personally have been unfairly stopped by police, 34% of all Americans say that someone they know has been unfairly treated by the police, and 18% have had such experiences themselves. “Across all races and ethnicities, many people may either feel a personal stake in reforming the police or they may be primed to believe accusations that the police are racially biased because of their own experiences, or both,” said Peter Levine, associate dean for research in Tufts’ Tisch College of Civic Life.

Other forms of discrimination are also pervasive

The survey shows that a higher percentage of African Americans report being subjected to other forms of discrimination than other groups do. For example, 28 percent of African Americans sometimes or frequently feel that other people are afraid of them. By contrast, nine percent of Latinos and six percent of Whites also have that sense.

The only form of discrimination for which African Americans are not the highest percentage involves being mistaken for someone of the same race despite having dissimilar appearances. This experience is most common for Asian-Americans in this survey, although the sample size for Asian-Americans is small.

*Includes Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and people reporting more than two races/ethnicities. The sample size does not permit reliable estimates for Asian Americans or Native Americans separately. The discrimination survey items were adapted from those developed by Williams, D. R., Yan Yu, Jackson, J. S., & Anderson, N. B. (1997). Racial Differences in Physical and Mental Health: Socio-economic Status, Stress and Discrimination. Journal of Health Psychology, 2(3), 335–351. The table and figure show the proportions of people who have ever been treated unfairly by the police, denied a service unfairly, or known someone who has faced police discrimination, and the proportions who “sometimes” or “frequently” report the other forms of discrimination. (The response options for these questions were different.)

Most people of all races and ethnicities (76 percent of the whole sample) report experiencing at least one of the forms of discrimination in the survey. However, the proportions of people who say they have never experienced any of these forms of experience varies from 11 percent of African Americans to 27 percent of Whites.

Personal experiences

In addition to answering the survey’s questions, respondents could type comments about their personal experiences with discrimination, and some described pervasive negative experiences based on feelings of racial isolation. For example, a Latina woman wrote, “It’s hard and a bit humiliating when you try to be in a town of only white people.” 

Several African American respondents offered stories of discrimination by the police. One man wrote, “[I was] walking home and got [stopped] by the police for no reason. He said ‘hey boy where are (you) going and start laughing. pull up your shirt’.  … one said this is how you plant drugs on someone” [sic].

An African American woman wrote, “I’ve been [asked] to leave a public parking lot, at an apartment complex by the police, my boyfriend resided there.” And another Black woman wrote, “I had a cop grab me by my bra for no reason other than I was doing what was asked of me.”

Forty-four percent of the people who say they have been treated unfairly by police are White.  One white man, for example, described this personal experience: “Pulled over by a police officer. He asked me to get out of the car, I did. Then he slammed me on the hood of his cruiser.” Another white man offered a more general observation: “The police almost everywhere think that they are better and more privileged than others. They think that the law does not apply to them and they act with utter impunity.”

A smaller number of respondents also provided positive comments about the police, and two respondents who are police officers said they had faced discrimination because of their law enforcement affiliations.

Tufts University’s Research Group on Equity in Health, Wealth and Civic Engagement was established in 2019 as part of a strategic effort to use resources and expertise across the university to address major global issues. It brings together researchers from across the university to discuss and investigate aspects of equity and inequity in the United States and the world. The research has been funded by Tufts University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research as one of several such initiatives.

The group’s principal investigators are Jennifer Allen, professor of Community Health in the Tufts School of Arts and Sciences;  Peter Levine, associate dean for academic affairs and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs at the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts; and Thomas Stopka, associate professor of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. Other members of the group can be found here.

By September 2020, the Research Group will launch a website at https://equityresearch.tufts.edu that will allow anyone to explore numerous dimensions of equity and inequity with an interactive data-visualization tool. Tufts’ Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life is funding the data-visualization tool.

The survey was fielded online by Ipsos using its KnowledgePanel. The sample was nationally representative, and the number of complete responses was 1,267. More technical information about the survey is at https://equityresearch.tufts.edu/the-survey/.

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About Tufts University

Tufts University, located on campuses in Boston, Medford/Somerville and Grafton, Massachusetts, and in Talloires, France, is recognized among the premier research universities in the United States. Tufts enjoys a global reputation for academic excellence and for the preparation of students as leaders in a wide range of professions. A growing number of innovative teaching and research initiatives span all Tufts campuses, and collaboration among the faculty and students in the undergraduate, graduate and professional programs across the university’s schools is widely encouraged.

Here is a general theory, drawn from the “Bloomington School” of political economy:

1. Public safety is a good. Providing this good is at least somewhat costly: people must keep an eye on each other, refrain from violence, teach their children to be respectful of others, maybe punish or at least shun violators. The benefit is shared: everyone gains from the prosperity and peace that result from public safety. But the benefit is fragile: when any individual violates these norms, public safety can be undermined for all.
2. Costly, fragile, shared goods are difficult to provide. One way to provide such a good is to make and enforce a rule that everyone must pay to provide it, and then use the funds to hire some people to do the work. If public education is a public good, then we can require everyone to pay taxes and use that money to hire professional teachers, and perhaps require every child to attend public schools. If public safety is a public good, then we can collect mandatory taxes to pay for police.
3. One advantage of a mandate is that it solves the collective-action problem of providing the common good. Another advantage is that it puts the service-provider under the control of a government, which can be an equitable and liberal democracy. A third advantage is that the same rules that create the service can also regulate it in the interest of justice. For example, when establishing public schools, we can require that they serve all children.
4. One disadvantage of this method is that the service-providers will likely reflect the biases and downright evils of the society. In a racist society, the schools, police, public health systems, and other public services will likely be racist. In a colony, they will probably be imperialist. In a communist state, they will probably be predatory. This means that although policing is not inherently racist in all countries and times, the police will be structurally racist in any racist society. (The generic problem is untrustworthiness.)
5. Another disadvantage is that the service-providers, although meant to be agents of the community, may develop their own interests. They may lobby, threaten to strike, vote as a bloc, form close relationships with elected leaders, and so on. Then their actual impact will deviate from their assigned mission.
6. Considering that the basic task of policing is coercion, the generic disadvantages of mandates will likely take the form of harmful coercion in the case of police. Harmful coercion is violence. In contrast, mandatory education or public health systems are more likely to demonstrate bias in how they distribute resources and define goods. Hospitals, for example, are “violent” (if at all) in a looser or more metaphorical sense than police with guns.
7. One kind of solution to the problems listed in #4-6 is reform: change rules, oversight mechanisms, organizational flowcharts, or budgets to reduce bias and self-interest.
8. Another kind of solution is to develop a thorough alternative to the mandatory approach described in #2. Mandates are not the only way to provide public goods. People can provide goods voluntarily under favorable circumstances.
9. One kind of alternative to a mandate is a market. Individuals can purchase their own goods, possibly with a subsidy from the state to equalize their buying power. This is the idea behind school vouchers; it is also very common in policing, where lots of security is actually provided by private firms and technology, such as alarm systems. The drawbacks of markets are hinted at in #3.
10. A different kind of alternative is a “commons”: a mechanism for collective action that is neither a top-down mandate nor a market. For both education and public safety, we see pervasive elements of commons alongside states and markets. For example, on a city block where adults keep their eyes on everyone’s kids, public safety (and education) are handled as a commons.
11. Hybrids are not only possible; they are usually wise, because they avoid the risks of systematic failure and domination that come from relying on one social form alone. For instance, it is possible to have police with a limited role, a rent-a-cop at the drug store, and a range of voluntary associations and networks that generate public safety as a commons.

See also on the phrase: Abolish the police!; insights on police reform from Elinor Ostrom and social choice theory; the Chicago police and NY State prison scandals reinforce the need for countervailing power; avoiding a sharp distinction between the state and the private sphere; China teaches the value of political pluralism; polycentricity: the case for a (very) mixed economy; what kind of a good is education?; and the right to strike.

Consider these points, made in the last 48 hours by scholars of color:

In the last weeks, there have been unprecedentedly large protests against police violence and systemic racism. The grievances are familiar. … But this time seems different. The costs of protesting are higher, and grievances are more intense, as I’ll explain below. Partly as a result, policymakers appear to be doing more to address protesters’ concerns. …

I find that legislators are 44 percent more likely to vote in favor of black protesters’ demands than white protesters’ demands. They are 39 percent more likely to vote in support of Latino protesters’ demands than white protesters’ demands. Legislators are 32 percent more likely to vote in favor of low-income protesters than more affluent protesters. And they are 10 percent more likely to vote in support of in-person protests, like marches or rallies, versus online protests, like online petitions or social media posts.

[She explains that protest by disadvantaged people is more costly, and costly protests have more political impact.] Legislators’ greater support of costly protest exists even when evaluating protests of equal size, disruptiveness and media attention. …

To be sure, the costliness of the protests is not the only factor in these rapid actions. Black Lives Matter has been shifting public opinion for several years now, and the Floyd protests have dramatically increased that shift, so that a majority of Americans now say they support the protesters’ claims. But given the dangers — the costs — of protesting during a pandemic, massive unemployment, widely circulated stories of brutality, and an election year, officials realize that the grievances are intense — and that black people and their allies are likely to punish officials at the polls if they don’t take action now.

LaGina Gause, “Black people have protested police killings for years. Here’s why officials are finally responding“

The change is coming “at a speed that I don’t think we’ve seen before in American politics,” said Dorian Warren, president of Community Change, a nonprofit that works with grassroots groups in low-income communities around the county. …

“You can’t argue with the facts that you’re seeing, or wish them away, or make up an alternative story, because it’s 8 minutes, 46 seconds.”

Moreover, the Floyd video came on the heels of years of organizing by Black Lives Matter activists, as well as movements like the Women’s March and, further back, Occupy Wall Street, Warren said. It also came after the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, young black Americans whose deaths also sparked outrage. Activists have been drawing attention to issues of police violence and race, gender, and class inequality for years, and those issues have only grown more urgent in recent months.

“One way to think about this metaphorically is like an earthquake,” he explained. Organizing by Black Lives Matter and other groups moves slowly, like tectonic plates: “and then all of a sudden they collide.”

Warren is quoted by Anna North in “White Americans are finally talking about racism. Will it translate into action?“

The massive, multiracial coalitions that have taken to the streets to raise their voices against police brutality are replenishing springs of solidarity, nourishing the roots of a future social compact that we must now all get on with the business of making. We will do that most effectively with a common purpose in mind.

A common purpose is not some airy-fairy thing. It is a practical tool that allows people to achieve something together. It is a map marked with a destination, a guide that permits collaborative navigation. A common purpose is perhaps the most powerful tool in the democratic tool kit, particularly in a crisis, because it can yield the solidarity that induces people to do hard things voluntarily rather than through authoritarian compulsion. Yet the tool has been disintegrating from disuse.

Our common purpose is liberty and justice for all. We have rediscovered it. It’s time to build on that discovery.

Danielle Allen, “We seek reforms to policing. But something even deeper needs repair“

Anger, shame, and fear are appropriate emotions right now, but the emotional palette should be richer than that. And it is richer for many scholars of color (and others) who were already deeply aware of injustice, but for whom the news is the power of the popular response.

History unfolds gradually, painfully, without evident purpose–until suddenly people break it open, allowing a better future to appear like a flash of light. Many such ruptures close again, but some do not. Pessimism (a habit ingrained by ordinary history) blocks the light. An inward turn, even if it is meant to be self-critical, can turn you away from solidarity. To take advantage of an opening, you must be receptive to hope, boldness, and even joy in the opportunity for solidarity and collective purpose.

See also: the kind of sacrifice required in nonviolence; taking satisfaction from politics in the face of injustice; notes on Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution; the prophetic mode in the Civil Rights Movement and in everyday politics; on the phrase: Abolish the police!; Martin Luther King as a philosopher.

Abolish the police! opens vistas of a radically different world. Such prophetic visions are important in the midst of social movements.

Abolish the police! sends a message of conviction and solidarity and indicates a rejection of compromise. Such rhetorical moves can help keep a movement coherent.

Abolish the police! prompts a discussion of possible alternatives, including public safety by unarmed citizen groups. Even if the actual recipe includes policing, these alternatives are valuable to consider.

To know how communities without police forces function, there are plenty of examples out there. Indigenous communities continue to practice community safety without the police, such as a community in Whitehorse, Canada. https://t.co/a86yEWn3Wv

— aaron vansintjan? (@a_vansi) June 9, 2020

Abolish the police! is a strong opening position in a negotiation with a police union. It basically says: “We would rather do without you than settle for the status quo, so how far are you willing to move?”

Abolish the police! means changing the responsibilities of the police and moving funds from one governmental department to another–a classic example of policy reform. Note that policing uses a total of about 6% of local budgets, so shifting half of their money from police to other purposes would mean changing 3% of a city’s budget. Christy E. Lopez writes that this “is not as scary (or even as radical) as it sounds,” but it does mean literally abolishing that “aspect” of policing that involves “the unjustified white control over the bodies and lives of black people.”

Abolish the police! will be understood as: “No more police at all” (not even in your bourgeois neighborhood where the police are generally helpful). It will thus be used in advocacy against police reform, whether successfully or not.

Abolish the police! serves as a label for radical ideas, giving moderate politicians cover for incremental change. “I’m not for abolishing the police–some of my best friends are police officers–but we should definitely assign mental health crises and traffic patrol to a civilian agency.”

During mass movements and tumultuous moments in history, phrases suddenly spread from smaller groups to the society at large and are used in many contradictory ways, promoted by both their supporters and their opponents: “No taxation without representation!” “All power to the Soviets!” “Hell, no, we won’t go!”

There is no point in thinking, “This slogan will be misunderstood and will cause a backlash.” The messaging is not really under anyone’s control. I think the most important move is to try to create spaces within a movement for relatively wide-ranging conversations. In this case, those who literally want to abolish the police should continually exchange ideas with those who want to reform the police. This discussion need not include people who deny white supremacy; it need not represent the whole population demographically. But it should bring together different streams of thought to generate the best ideas as circumstances evolve.

(By the way, although my information is entirely anecdotal, I do think such conversations are happening right now.)

See also: the value of diversity and discussion within social movements; insights on police reform from Elinor Ostrom and social choice theory; practical lessons from classic cases of civil disobedience; Habermas with a Whiff of Tear Gas: Nonviolent Campaigns and Deliberation in an Era of Authoritarianism; Why Civil Resistance Works; and notes on Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution.

But as an historian of black social movements, my view is that as widespread and destructive as the 1968 rebellions were, neither their size nor the challenge they posed to the American political system approached what the U.S. has seen over the past two weeks. …

More than the number and size of the protests, though, what makes the 2020 uprisings unprecedented are the ways that they have pulled together multiple currents within the U.S. protest tradition into a mighty river of demand for fundamental change in American society. …

The point is not, as others have argued,* that it is the level of involvement of whites in the protests that distinguishes them from previous high points of anti-racist protest. There is in fact a long history of white support for, and participation in, black protest movements. …

[What is distinctive is the reform agenda.] Despite, or perhaps because of the protests’ decentralized and leaderless nature, they have managed to put on the table the broadest and most comprehensive set of social and economic reforms since the Poor People’s campaign that followed on the heels of Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.

Matthew Countryman, “2020 uprisings, unprecedented in scope, join a long river of struggle in America“

I want to emphasize that I think white Americans have gone through quite radical changes in their attitudes, and that we’re talking about a more likely 25 percent of Americans who are hardcore racist, but I think most Americans have quite decent views about race.

But sociologists have argued that while some whites may have liberal views, a lot of them are not prepared to make the concessions that are important for the improvement of black lives. For example, one of the reasons why people have been crowded in ghettos is the fact that housing is so expensive in the suburbs, and one reason for that is that bylaws restrict the building of multi-occupancy housing. These bylaws have been very effective in keeping out moderate-income housing from the suburbs, and that has kept out working people, among whom blacks are disproportionate, from moving there and having access to good schools. Sociologists have claimed that while we do have genuine improvement in racial attitudes, what we don’t have is the willingness for white liberals to put their money where their mouth is.

Orlando Patterson, “Why America can’t escape its racist roots” [Not a good headline, because his piece is quite optimistic]

The situation is dire. The causes for personal anger many. In my own case, incandescent rage has blocked my capacity to think for several days. For me, prayer helps.

There is something we can do.

First, choose peace. Revolution never succeeds unless it rides on the back of a deeper commitment to the process of constitution. The goal has to be to build. These things can be done only on the basis of a commitment to peace. We need a better normal at the end of this. Not a new normal, a rinse and repeat of the old but with face masks. We need peace. …

Second, choose self-government. Societies can resolve their problems through only one of two mechanisms: authoritarian decision or self-government. Self-government delivers the sturdier foundation for human flourishing — a foundation that permits people to craft their own life courses and develop their full potential. To choose self-government, however, means to choose the institutions of collective decision-making. Voting, running for office, working through committee processes to identify and implement policy solutions. …

Third, channel the energies of protest directly into governance even through our imperfect institutions. We need a transformed criminal-justice system. Yes, it is good that the officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck has been criminally charged. But the problems we face are not solved one case of police violence at a time. We need a systems-level goal.

Here is what we should choose: reduce our reliance on incarceration from 70 percent of the sanctions imposed in our criminal-justice system to 10 percent. This is not utopian. …

No justice, no peace, we often say. It’s also true, though, that without peace, there is no justice.

Danielle Allen, “The situation is dire. We need a better normal at the end of this — and peace”

*including me, on Saturday evening, during a 5-minute interview on KCBS-San Francisco.

See also: Everyday Democracy: racism, policing, and community change; insights on police reform from Elinor Ostrom and social choice theory.

This clip from Eyes on the Prize* shows the first and only moment in the career of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when a march that he led involved violence. He had to be ushered away in a car and left Memphis. When he returned, he gave perhaps his greatest speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (April 3, 1968) in which he prophesied his own death.

In this, his final speech, he describes the historical moment: “The nation is sick, trouble is in the land, confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

He decries media coverage of the movement:

Let us keep the issues where they are. (Right) The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. [Applause] Now we’ve got to keep attention on that. (That’s right) That’s always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window breaking. (That’s right) I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that 1,300 sanitation workers are on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn’t get around to that. (Yeah) [Applause]. Now we’re going to march again, and we’ve got to march again

He lays out a strategy that includes boycotting white-owned companies and “strengthen[ing] black institutions.” He says, “I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank.”

And he makes the case that a massive nonviolent protest movement–in which the sheer number of nonviolent protesters overwhelms both the police and any citizens who use violence–is powerful. It is not (I would say) powerful in the sense of being moving and rhetorically effective, like a “powerful” song or speech. It is powerful in the sense that it seizes the ability to determine outcomes. The Birmingham movement compelled the Civil Rights Act; Selma compelled the Voting Rights Act. “And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn’t adjust to, and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.”

King gave this speech in the evening of April 3, despite a thunderstorm and his own deep qualms about speaking in Memphis. The next day, he was murdered. Riots, uprisings, insurrections (or whatever you want to label them) began across the country. And on Nov. 5., 1968, Richard M. Nixon won a national election that has been attributed to white backlash.

A few observations:

– The backlash was in no way the responsibility of the Civil Rights Movement. The causes included King’s assassination, the police and the FBI, media frames, and a racially biased majority. In Memphis and elsewhere, the Civil Rights Movement was doing what it had to do. To take a phrase from the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” blaming the protesters for the backlash would be “like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery.” As King wrote in The Atlantic in 1967, “Let us say it boldly that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.” We must “keep the issues where they are”: on the injustice, not responses to it. On the other hand, 1968 was a year of defeat, and it’s important to strategize about how to win instead of losing.

– Mass nonviolent movements are miraculous. They defy predictions about human behavior based on self-interest, limited information, and powerful emotions. They are also fragile–easy to disrupt with agents provocateurs, misinformation, and violent responses. King fully grasped that a mass nonviolent uprising is a kind of rupture in ordinary history. It is a moment when a better future suddenly becomes visible in the present. That is why delaying it can easily kill it. In the “Letter,” he writes that time can be made “an ally of the forces of social stagnation.” Therefore, “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.”

– 2020 seems similar to 1968, yet different in important ways. Nixon was a far more skillful than Trump at exploiting backlash. He made the maintenance of racial hierarchy appear respectable by acting like a sober statesman. Trump is the face of white supremacy but happens to be grievously wounded by the pandemic, which would have been a threat to him even if he hadn’t grotesquely bungled it. (Sheer chance often determines outcomes in human events.) The country has also become more diverse: whites constituted 88% of the US population in 1970 versus 72% in 2020. On the other hand, the virus does make it harder to sustain nonviolent protests that are big enough to marginalize the police and violent individuals. People who would be relatively likely to maintain nonviolent discipline are also relatively likely to stay home to avoid the pandemic. Finally, the media landscape is far more fragmented, so that some Americans can see police rioting against innocent protesters while others see a nation devolving into crime. It is hard even to assess who is seeing what, let alone change the balance.

*Shearer, J. Stekler, P. (Director). (1990). The Promised Land [Video file]. PBS. Retrieved June 3, 2020, from Kanopy.

In Wired, Natalie Chyi offers an excellent list of ways that people are fighting misinformation–and promoting reliable and useful information–during the pandemic:

Neighborhoods are creating Slack groups and communities are coming up with mutual aid spreadsheets to coordinate aid and support each other. … Local geographies have been reconstructed in online spaces, most notably as students are rebuilding their universities within Minecraft. … . Volunteers on Wikipedia have been working tirelessly to ensure that the site serves reliable and up-to-date information, especially surrounding the virus. Students are compiling master lists of summer internship updates, cancellations, and opportunities across various industries. Groups are creating crowdsourced libraries of resources tailored to the unique needs of everyone from mourners to remote workers to policymakers. New online platforms have been created for specialists like doctors, engineers, and scientists to find and contribute their expertise to ongoing relief projects. Thousands of Covid-19 related open-source projects are popping up, with the source code and documentation freely available to enable their use. Some focus on software, like code for a hospital impact model developed by the University of Pennsylvania; others on hardware, like instructions for 3D printing medically-approved masks and other critical supplies.

Finally, knowledge previously locked behind paywalls or intellectual property protections has been made available to the public for the purposes of fighting the pandemic.

Chyi credits Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess for the idea of an information commons (itself an application of Lin Ostrom’s ideas to the special case of information), and she cites me to the effect that “this form of collective action and participation of place-based knowledge strengthens communities by giving them a shared sense of identity, understanding, and trust.” Incidentally, the whole book by Ostrom and Hess, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons (2007) in which my chapter appears is–fittingly–online and free.

See also my new chapter on Elinor Ostrom and Civic Studies; the legacy of Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School; Elinor Ostrom, 1933-2012; understanding knowledge as a commons.