Our friends at IAP2 and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium just announced a great new leadership team for the Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD). We’ve been talking to some members of the team about the potential of NCDD helping the JPD with outreach and dissemination to the dialogue and deliberation community. Stay tuned for updates, and check out the full announcement below.

Announcing changes in the leadership of the Journal of Public Deliberation 

DDC and IAP2 Federation are pleased to announce exciting changes in the leadership of the Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD). After three highly successful years at the helm of the journal, Tim Steffensmeier and David Procter are stepping down, and a new editorial team is taking over:

• Laura Black of the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University will serve as the new Editor.
• Tim Shaffer, who directs the Center for Leadership and Engagement at Wagner College, will be an Associate Editor and the Book Review Editor.
• Nancy Thomas of the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University, who also directs The Democracy Imperative (TDI), will be an Associate Editor.

Since its inception in 2004, JPD articles have been downloaded over 82,000 times. The journal occupies a preeminent role in a growing, global, cross-disciplinary field. Black, Shaffer, and Thomas plan to expand the types of articles published, create a new section for shorter articles that focus on innovative ideas and best practice examples, continue the journal’s success with special issues and symposia, incorporate book reviews, and explore new possibilities for interactivity and social media. The new team will soon be issuing their first call for proposals.

Under the leadership of Steffensmeier and Procter, who are based at the Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy at Kansas State University, JPD has made great progress. Article downloads have tripled and submissions have doubled over the past three years. The production schedule accelerated to two issues per year. Special issues on Participatory Budgeting and (De)liberation Technology garnered wide attention. Steffensmeier and Procter also husbanded the journal’s transition to a new platform at Berkeley Electronic Press, www.publicdeliberation.org, which provides the new editorial team an expanded range of online tools.

In their work, Steffensmeier and Procter have benefited enormously from the work of Associate Editor William Richter, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Kansas State, and Chandra Ruthstrom of the university’s Center for Engagement and Community Development.

Laura Black is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Ohio University. She studies group deliberation and dialogue with a special focus on storytelling, conflict, and group facilitation. Some of her research has also investigated the use of online tools in deliberative forums. She has worked on several research projects with organizations such as the Kettering Foundation and the Interactivity Foundation and local civic organizations. Her research is published in JPD, Small Group Research, and several communication journals as well as edited books on deliberation and democracy.  She has served on the editorial board for JPD and also co-edited a special issue of the International Journal of Public Participation on the communication practices in public meetings.  Laura received her Ph.D. in communication from the University of Washington in 2006.

Tim Shaffer is Director of the Center for Leadership and Engagement at Wagner College. His research interests include historical and contemporary forms of civic engagement and the public philosophies that animate citizens. He has published on topics such as environmental leadership and deliberative democracy as well as higher education’s role in cultivating and supporting civic life. He earned a bachelor’s degree in theology from St. Bonaventure University, master’s degrees in public administration and theological studies, respectively, from the University of Dayton, and a PhD in education from Cornell University.

Nancy Thomas directs research on college student engagement in democracy at Tisch College and CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, at Tufts University. She also co-founded and directs the Democracy Imperative and serves as a senior associate for Everyday Democracy. Nancy has worked for more than 20 years in the national diversity, civic, and democracy reform efforts in higher education. In 2010, she published Educating for Deliberative Democracy and co-edited (with Martin Carcasson) a special issue of JPD on teaching democracy across the curriculum. She holds a BA in government from St. Lawrence University, a law degree from Case Western Reserve University, and a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

In addition to IAP2 and DDC, the Journal is also supported by a range of other institutions, including:

• Center for Democratic Deliberation, Penn State University
• Kettering Foundation
• New England Center for Civic Life, Franklin Pierce University
• Public Agenda
• The Democracy Imperative
• Ohio University
• Wagner College
• Tufts University

For further information kindly contact:

Iris Almeida-Côté, Executive Director, IAP2 Federation

iris@iap2.org or visit the website: www.iap2.org

Matt Leighninger, Executive Director, Deliberative Democracy Consortium

mattleighninger@earthlink.net or visit www.deliberative-democracy.net

Our partners at the Kettering Foundation recently posted about a write-up on their own David Holwerk’s talk at Rhodes University in South Africa on how journalists talk about citizens.  His remarks focused on the question, “What is a citizen?“, and how the answer is related to the role of the press in a democracy.

In the U.S. Constitution, the role of the press is given explicit protections, ostensibly because a free press that can cover whatever it wants is an integral part of a well-functioning democracy. Indeed, journalism is sometimes conceived of a service provided for citizens to be able to participate in an informed way in their governments.  But in a time like ours when news is often hard to discern from entertainment — with celebrities, Twitter commentary, and the results of award ceremonies often getting as much air time air time as local political issues, if not more — what do the big stories in our press say about what journalists are thinking about what is is to be a citizen?

Holwerk delved into the question’s implications for journalists:

Holwerk said that it seems to be a universal article of faith among journalists that they serve the needs of citizens in democracy. But journalists seem much less certain about what citizens actually do, which raises doubts about the ability of journalists to serve citizens’ needs effectively. “Why do people need things?” asked Holwerk. When you need something, he said, it implies that you want to do something. “If need implies action, then what is it that citizens do? They vote. We give them the information they need to vote. Why? Are citizens only voters?”

These are the questions Holwerk has been grappling with for the past four years. At the Kettering Foundation many political scientists and theorists have some ideas about what citizens do. So Holwerk started to think, “You ought to be able to figure out what citizens do by looking at what journalists do.” But when you look at newspapers, watch television or listen to the radio, it’s difficult to find citizens there doing anything, he said.

Journalists and editors need to develop a broader, denser, more robust understanding of what it is that citizens do, he said, but the conversation seems completely theoretical in the context of American journalism.

His reflections were made all the more powerful because  Holwerk was in South Africa, a country still relatively early on in its life as a democracy, where questions of citizenship are more regularly discussed in newspapers and the press.  But when it came to actually answering the question, “what is a citizen?”, Holwerk offered an insightful answer that pointed to the fact that other people in one’s community

Holwerk’s definition of “citizen” is actually a definition of “citizens” – casting the word as one necessarily addressed to implying a plurality of people.

What is a citizen?

Holwerk said an obstacle to journalists everywhere is not having a clear definition of the word. The legal definition of citizen is someone who is entitled to full rights, including voting rights, in their native state, he said, but this is both too broad and too narrow for the purpose of journalism. Another definition is anyone with the ability to act, he said, but if merely having the ability to act makes you a citizen and you choose not to act, there is no need for journalists to act, and nothing to cover.

Holwerk’s definition of citizens is two people working together to solve a shared public problem. For journalists, if two people work together to solve a private problem, it’s not news, but if they find a solution that benefits the public, that is news.

This definition of citizen is, for me, one of the best I’ve ever heard.  It gets to the heart of why we value things like dialogue and deliberation: at bottom, we know that we are in something together with other people around us, and we need to relate to and interact with them to make it work.  And when we engage in collaboration with others around us for our common good, that is getting to the essence of what it is to be a citizen.

How do you answer the question “what is a citizen?”  How does Holwerk’s definition strike you?  And what does it mean for the journalists of our nation?  Share your reflections with us in the comments section or in the NCDD Facebook group.

You can find the full coverage of Holwerk’s talk on the Rhodes University website here:  www.ru.ac.za/jms/jmsnews/name,93835,en.html.