Apply for the Ninth Annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies

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The ninth annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies will take place from June 12 to June 22, 2017 at Tufts University. It will be an intensive, two-week, interdisciplinary seminar that brings together faculty, advanced graduate students, and practitioners from many countries and diverse fields of study.

Organized by Peter Levine of Tufts University’s Tisch College and Karol Soltan of the University of Maryland, the Summer Institute will engage participants in challenging discussions of such topics as:

  • What kinds of citizens (if any) do good regimes need?
  • What should such citizens know, believe, and do?
  • What practices and institutional structures promote the right kinds of citizenship?
  • What ought to be the relationships among empirical evidence, ethics, and strategy?

This is the syllabus for the eighth annual seminar (in 2016). The 2017 syllabus will be modified but will largely follow this outline.

You can read more about the motivation for the Institute in the “Framing Statement” by Harry Boyte, University of Minnesota; Stephen Elkin, University of Maryland; Peter Levine, Tufts; Jane Mansbridge, Harvard; Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University; Karol Soltan, University of Maryland; and Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania:

Practicalities

Tuition for the Institute is free, but students are responsible for their own housing and transportation. A Tufts University dormitory room can be rented for $230-$280/week. Credit is not automatically offered, but special arrangements for graduate credit may be possible.

To apply: please email your resume, an electronic copy of your graduate transcript (if applicable), and a cover email about your interests to Peter Levine at Peter.Levine@Tufts.edu. For best consideration, apply no later than March 17, 2017. You may also sign up for occasional announcements even if you are not sure that you wish to apply.

The seminar will be followed (from June 22, evening, until June 24) by a public conference–”Frontiers of Democracy 2017″–in downtown Boston. Participants in the institute are expected to stay for the public conference. See information on the conference here. That page also explains how you can propose a concurrent session for the 2017 conference, whether or not you wish to apply for the Summer Institute.

Join Confab Call with Not In Our Town on Responses to Hate

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We are pleased to announce that NCDD is hosting our next Confab Call with Not In Our Town, an NCDD member organization that uses film and dialogue to help regular people respond to hate in their communities. This hour-long webinar will take place Wednesday, February 8th, 2017 from 1-2pm Eastern/10-11am Pacific, and we encourage everyone to register today for a inspiring call!

Not In Our Town is both an organization and a movement dedicated to stopping hate, addressing bullying, and building safe, inclusive communities for all. Not In Our Town (NIOT) was launched as an organization in 1995 with a landmark PBS film that documented the efforts of everyday people in Billings, Montana who stood up together after a series of hate crimes targeting their Native American, Black, and Jewish neighbors.

The story and the film went on to inspire many other communities in the US and around the world to form their own responses to hate crimes and hate groups cropping up in their locales, and the NIOT team continued to make inspirational short films documenting their stories as they unfolded. NIOT has since made over 100 of these films and created discussion guides that accompany them. The films and discussion guides cover dozens of subject areas and topics, and they are compiled into an online hub that is designed to support towns, schools, campuses, faith communities, or any other kind of group in launching dialogues on how they can address issues of hate and bullying that are impacting them.

This call is part of NCDD’s ongoing #BridgingOurDivides campaign that seeks to heal the damage done in the divisive 2016 election while also addressing the longer-standing divisions in our country. As many communities where NCDD members live and work in struggle with how to deal with the rise in hate crimes and assaults that we’ve seen since the election, and as we prepare for the possibility that this trend might not go away, NIOT’s dialogue resources and model for supporting action can be critical tools for the D&D community to tap into. Be sure to join us on this Confab to find out how!

This Confab Call will feature a discussion with NCDD supporting member Patrice O’Neill, who serves as the CEO and Executive Producer of Not In Our Town. Patrice will share an overview of NIOT’s work and the approach that they use their films to launch community-wide dialogues and guide people from discussion into taking action against hate.

The call will also be an exclusive opportunity to discuss how the D&D field can support the growing need for conversation on addressing hate and violence in our communities. NIOT has seen a surge in requests for its services since November, which presents a unique opportunity for D&D practitioners to connect with and support NIOT’s work while also possibly cross-pollinating our methods and models, and call participants will have the chance to think together with Patrice about what that could look like.

You won’t want to miss this exciting conversation on NIOT’s model and resources and how the NCDD network can better interface with the NIOT network. We highly encourage everyone to register today for this great call!

About NCDD’s Confab Calls…

Confab bubble imageNCDD’s Confab Calls are opportunities for members (and potential members) of NCDD to talk with and hear from innovators in our field about the work they’re doing and to connect with fellow members around shared interests. Membership in NCDD is encouraged but not required for participation. Confabs are free and open to all. Register today if you’d like to join us!

The White Moderate

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In honor of Martin Luther King Day, today I wanted to share one of my favorite passages from Dr. King. It’s from a Letter from a Birmingham Jail, as Dr. King reflects upon the motivation for his work. He calls out the ‘white moderate’ – that person who “constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.'”

The white moderate is the greatest stumbling block of justice.

All of us in social justice work are all too familiar with the wide range of views and opinions on what actions are right and what actions are effective. These disagreements are good and healthy and productive. But those of us with positions of relatively more power – us white activists in particular – need to be mindful not to become just another white moderate; to never “paternalistically believe he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

The full passage is below:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

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the prophetic mode in the Civil Rights Movement and in everyday politics

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On Martin Luther King Day, Kenyatta R. Gilbert published an explanatory article in The Conversation about King’s “prophetic vision.” Gilbert traced King’s rhetorical mode to three “particularly inventive” Black preachers active during the Great Migration: “Baptist pastor Adam C. Powell Sr., the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ) pastor Florence S. Randolph and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) bishop Reverdy C. Ransom.” All three were political reformers and community leaders who echoed the Hebrew prophets (as well as the Gospels) in their sermons.

If you’ve made a careful study of King’s own writing and speaking, you will recognize constant evocations of the Biblical prophets. Just for instance, in the “I Have a Dream Speech,” King quotes Amos 5:24 (“But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream”) and Isaiah 40:4 (“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain”).

In fact, it can be a bit of cliché to call King and other Civil Rights Leaders “prophetic.” That combination of words yields 649,000 hits on Google right now. So it’s worth looking a bit closer at the texts of the nineteen biblical books traditionally called Nevi’im, prophecies, to see what we mean when we associate them with the great Civil Rights leaders.

These are heterogeneous texts, containing biographical information, autobiographical passages, dramatic narratives (like Jonah in the whale), reports of the Lord’s words, dialogues between the prophet and the Lord, dreams, acts of these wise men and women, sermons, predictions, and much poetry.

Although this whole body of text enriched King’s speech and thought, I think that we have something more specific in mind when we use the word “prophetic” for his words.

A prophesy, in the narrower sense, often begins with a moral condemnation of the present, often directed explicitly at the most powerful people: the kings, priests, and rich men:

Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right. (Amos 5:11-12)

The prophesy may forecast the punishment and fall of these wicked men. “Woe unto you,” says the Lord, through Amos, six verses later. A classic prophesy then predicts a better time, a time of justice. This prediction is not empirical, based on continuing the current trends into the future. Rather, it is moral and hortatory. If the people begin to act righteously, then God will help them make the world better. “Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph” (Amos 5:15).

A Hebrew prophet derives his authority from God’s interactions with him–or her, since Sarah, Miriam, Devorah, Hannah, Avigail, Huldah, and Esther are traditionally named prophets along with the bearded men. In contrast, a modern political prophet should be cautious about claiming direct divine inspiration. Instead, a modern prophet invites the audience to consider a moral description of the present. If they agree, and they behave as recommended, then the prophesy may become true as a result of their coordinated action.

So understood, prophesies can be rather humdrum. You are using the prophetic mode if you stand up at a PTA meeting and say, “The playground is a mess. If we all get together and clean it up this Saturday, the kids will be safer and happier next week.” The divine intervention and high flown language of the King James Version are missing, but you are still submitting a moral condemnation of the present, an exhortation to action, and a vision of the better world that will result.

The problem is that some prophesies are good, and some are bad. The bad ones either describe a morally worse world or demand unproductive actions. A certain President-Elect, for example, promises to make America great again in ways that I consider both unlikely and undesirable. We need methods for distinguishing good prophesies from bad ones. And two dominant modes of thought are unhelpful.

The scientific (and social-scientific) mode is unhelpful because it tries to separate empirical descriptions from moral judgments. Moral judgment is presented as mere opinion, and anyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s. This mode is also unhelpful because it predicts the future based on data from the past. We can make the future different from the past, but only if we refuse to assume that observed patterns must hold.

The professional mode used in bureaucracies (whether governmental or corporate) is also unhelpful because it is limited to means/ends reasoning. It says: If you want this to happen, you may (or should) do that. But what should you want to happen?

The scientific mode fits neatly together with the professional/bureaucratic mode when institutions use social science to find efficient means to their fixed ends.

The prophetic mode challenges these ways of thinking. A prophetic voice claims that some things really are bad (not merely in the prophet’s opinion), that a better future is possible, and that we can and must create that future by changing how we act. Prophesies are not hypotheses that are either true or false. They are exhortations that we can make true by how we react to them. They should be rooted in the experience of the speaker, the experiences of the audience, and a deeper tradition that preserves many others’ experiences, such as the Biblical background on which King drew so regularly.

King and his fellow African American Christian Civil Rights leaders exemplified prophetic thought. Their texts–together with the ways they were received and used–are models of a form of reasoning that is essential to citizenship in all times and places. Theirs is a gift that we must preserve and pass on.

See also: “an exercise for Martin Luther King Day,” “a different Shakespeare from the one I love” (with a excursus on the King James Version in Black political rhetoric),”the Nehemiah story,” and “homage to Hannah Arendt at The New School” (on “natality” as human freedom from the past).

Addressing Power in Dialogue Across Difference

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In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we thought we would share the piece below from Katie Hyten of NCDD member organization Essential Partners. In it, Katie reflects on the reality and impact of power differences in dialogue, pointing out that even if we don’t acknowledge it, power is there in our conversations. Especially if we’re to effectively bridge divides and cross lines of race, class, gender, and so on, we cannot ignore the fact that power dynamics will need to be managed. We encourage you to read the piece below or find the original here.

How Does Power Affect Our Conversations?

Essential PartnersIn a recent conversation with activists on a college campus, student leaders informed our practitioners that student protesters showed little interest in dialogue because they assumed that “dialogue” was an attempt to placate them by the administration. The power of the administration carried both weight and assumptions.

In another of our dialogues, a participant assumed he would have to begin speaking with an apology for his privilege before even participating in the conversation. In both of these instances (and in so many more), real and perceived power differences created profound barriers to meaningful conversation. Perhaps nowhere has that felt truer than following the results of the 2016 election.

When we create spaces for groups to communicate across differences, we run head first into questions of power. Indeed, it is impossible to have effective conversations around differences without first having often clumsy conversations about power – conversations where we step on toes and say the wrong thing because we want to do better. And because we know that having diverse, cohesive, engaged members of a community or institution is not only the right thing to do – it also increases innovation, profit, and community safety.

So here’s what we know.

Power exists.

As we bring communities together in conversation, power emerges – both universally and in unique ways. And while we don’t want to unintentionally reinforce or effect existing power structures, seriously addressing power imbalances in dialogue can also feel risky. Acknowledging power might actually result in more upfront tensions as people speak to their experiences relating to one another.

Power is dynamic.

It can coalesce around knowledge, gender, race, sexuality, personality, age, experience, communication, class, language, education – and so much more. Power exists when the newest employee in the office sits in meetings furiously googling unfamiliar acronyms. It exists in older generations struggling to adapt to the newest iterations of office technology. Power exists when wisdom is seen as equivalent to age, when a show of emotion redirects an entire meeting, when a young black man pulled over for texting while driving shakes in fear for his physical safety.

If we aim to have truly effective conversations in our communities, we have to set aside our personal assumptions and design processes specifically to address the concerns we hear around power – real and perceived. And if we aim to have conversations that build understanding and resilience, we also have a responsibility to listen to the experiences of those concerned about how dialogue addresses issues of power and adapt our model as needed to meet those concerns.

As we discuss issues of power and privilege in our work, we first think about how to structure a conversation that invites engagement from everyone involved. We have to ask genuine questions and listen to what we hear.

Additionally, we have to address the fact that we don’t all communicate the same way – and certain types of communication invite or encourage some people, inhibiting or discouraging others. Often (and largely without malice or ill-intention), those who have the most power decide how conversations happen in their communities or institutions. This can be as simple and automatic as “we’ve always had the administrator present first in meetings.” When thinking about how to help all participants feel welcome and fully included in the conversation, we should not assume to know how people from other cultures or positions of power will show up and participate.

Are interruptions rude or a signal of respect? How do people prefer to convey emotion? In some situations, equal speaking time may convey equality of voice. In others situations, equality of voice may mean ensuring everyone has the time they need to speak or write, whatever that might mean for them. If we want to address the real issues and divisions in our communities – and reap the benefits of truly diverse thinking and perspectives – we need to design conversations that value the dynamic power of participants.

Ultimately, conversations across identity cannot take place just once. In a one-time conversation, it’s challenging to respond to unexpected hurdles or differences in styles of communication and make adjustments accordingly for the next meeting.

We can also recognize that every community relies on many different conversations to meet different needs. As we help communities invest in conversation with each other, we must be intentional about the range of opportunities we provide for people to engage. We need to listen to voices of those who feel unheard, and respond in a way that serves the group and the purposes.

Most of all, we need to create conversations that help people bring forward their unique sources of power, shaping a path towards a resilient community that embraces complexity and value of each person. Because when the conversation itself incorporates ways of addressing power and privilege, those clumsy conversations about power in your community become just a little bit easier.

You can find the original version of this Essential Partners blog piece at www.whatisessential.org/blog/how-does-power-affect-our-conversations.

Demographic bias in social media language analysis

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Before the break, I had the opportunity to hear Brendan O’Connor talk about his recent paper with Su Lin Blodgett and Lisa Green: Demographic Dialectal Variation in Social Media: A Case Study of African-American English.

Imagine an algorithm designed to classify sentences. Perhaps it identifies the topic of the sentence or perhaps it classifies the sentiment of the sentence. These algorithms can be really accurate – but they are only as good as the corpus they are trained on.

If you train an algorithm on the New York Times and then try to classify tweets, for example, you may not have the kind of success you might like – the language and writing style of the Times and a typical tweet being so different.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the Blodgett et al. paper, but perhaps most notable to me is their comparison of the quality of existing language identification tools on tweets by race. They find that these tools perform poorly on text associated with African Americans while performing better on text associated with white speakers.

In other words, if you got a big set of Twitter data and filtered out the non-English tweets, that algorithm would disproportionally identify tweets from black authors as not being in English, and those tweets would then be removed from the dataset.

Such an algorithm, trained on white language, has the unintentional effect of literally removing voices of color.

Their paper presents a classifier to eliminate that disparity, but the study is an eye-opening finding – a cautionary tail for anyone undertaking language analysis. If you’re not thoughtful and careful in your approach, even the most validated classifier may bias your data sample.

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