Civic Studies

This essay in the forthcoming special issue of Educational Studies In Japan, "Politics and Education in a Global Age," agrees with Gert Biesta  that subjectification, “the uniqueness of each individual human being" holds the promise of citizens-as-subjects breaking with the ideal of the “good citizen” whose identity is inscribed by modern states and markets. Making such a break involves “exposure to the experiment of democracy,” in Biesta’s view. The promise is real but the danger is that subjectification becomes “identity politics” which erodes the responsibility of citizens for society as a whole and generates bitter clashes as identities are manipulated by elites using social media and other technologies.

“What is democracy?” is the question that marks the difference between subjects as co-creators and subjugation. To overcome the dangers and realize the possibilities of the age of the subject requires shifting paradigms from state-centered democracy to citizen-centered democracy. Citizen-centered democracy rests on conceptions of citizens as co-creators who undertake collective, self-organized work of building society and the commonwealth (a concept of the citizen which predates the modern state); and politics as pluralistic negotiation across differences. State-centered theories of democracy and associated ideas of the citizen and politics form the dominant paradigm today and lead to growing conflict and civic unraveling.

Despite problems in Japanese political education this essay describes powerful resources in Japan’s civic life and cultural history to lay foundations for a paradigm of democracy as society.  The essay concludes with a look at the large scale experiment in democratic pedagogy based on citizen as co-creator and democratic society at Tokai University., a leading STEM university.

In this 2017 Dewey lecture for the John Dewey Society, I argue for a nonviolent citizen politics, as a positive response to the question raised by nine scientists in a Scientific American essay, “Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?”, February 25, 2017. Drawing on Dewey’s 1902 speech, “The School as Social Center,” I suggest schools embedded in communities are potential sites for nonviolent citizen politics.

For striking examples, see the Former Members of Congress webinar on the more than 5,000 Rosenwald schools and 10,000 libraries created by black communities during the days of segregation. Here's the link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH8vyQ8NS2s&t=65s

This paper, to be delivered at the Agency and Activism session at the John Dewey Society John Dewey Democracy and Education Centennial Conference on April 8, argues for an agentic view of democracy and a conception of teachers and teacher educators as  citizens. Such a public work approach, affiliated with the new transdisciplinary field of Civic Studies, challenges sentimentalized versions of citizenship. It also holds potential to help birth a Democratic Renaissance. This paper is an adaptation of the special Centennial Issue of "Educational Theory," commemorating Dewey's Democracy and Education.

We're in the struggle for America's soul, between hypercompetitive ideas that the American dream is about a few winners, and the story of democracy as cooperative endeavor.

We need a broad public conversation in 2016, inside academia and beyond about "what is democracy?"

In this essay Harry Boyte and Margaret Finders argue that addressing the " shrinkage " of education and democracy requires acting politically to reclaim and augment Deweyan agency-focused concepts of democracy and education. Looking at agency from the vantage of civic studies, which advances a politics of agency — a citizen politics that is different from ideological politics — and citizens as cocreators of political communities, Boyte and Finders explore the technocratic trends that have eclipsed agency. These disempower educators, students, and communities. Using the case study of the youth empowerment initiative Public Achievement and its translation into the Special Education Program and partnerships of Augsburg College, the authors conclude with an examination of how agentic practices have survived in " shadow spaces " in schools, how such spaces might be turned into " free spaces " for democratic change, and how teacher education needs to prepare " citizen teachers " as well as promoting pedagogies of empowerment. These suggest grounds for a movement of hope and democratic change.

This essay, the written text of the Kamm Lecture at Oklahoma State University delivered on February 21, 2017 and edited on May 22, 2021, describes examples of "educating the citizen professional" from land grant history and argues its revival is the next stage of the civic engagement movement in higher education, key to overcoming the detachment of higher education from deep involvement with the life of communities.

The slightly edited version (May 22, 2021) makes clear that such education for citizen or civic professionalism was also widespread in locally rooted liberal arts colleges. The edited version is also attached.

This essay, forthcoming in the "Encyclopedia of American Governance" edited by Stephen L. Schechter (Macmillan, 2016), describes the political concept of civic agency and its genealogy.

The concept of cIvic agency has emerged out of organizing which translates the citizen politics  of community organizing and the theory of free spaces where people have  space to self-organize for democracy change,  into institutional change efforts in schools, colleges, and elsewhere. These have also highlighted contemporary challenges to civic agency such as technocracy, consumer identities, and  hyper-competitive individualism. The partnerships of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, first at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute, now merged into the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, have been central to this conceptual development.

This essay is for a workshop at Arizona State University March 15-17, launching "Populist Studies." I take issue with dominant understandings of populism from the perspective of elite, government-centered theory, and "populisms" of left and right. I argue that all three variants leave "the whole people," in all their cantankerous plurality, out of populism, and also neglect the connections between formal politics and government policy and civic life,

Drawing on Harry Boyte's experiences as co-chair of the Civic Engagement Subcommittee in the Obama 2008 campaign, this study for the Kettering Foundation analyzes the "knowledge war" which increasingly divides and roils contemporary societies and the citizen professional and civic agency alternative to the "cult of the expert."

In this essay for the 2021 conference supported by the American Education Research Association, “Civic Studies: The University as Civic Catalyst,” I develop the argument that this is a "Deweyan moment" when reconnecting schools and democracy has never been more urgent. I argue that the “school wars” roiling American schools, school boards, and communities, for all their dangers, also represent an opportunity to launch a reversal of the centralizing processes of school consolidation and disempowerment of teachers, students, families and communities which have been at work for decades. An “empowerment gap” is a more apt term for school conflicts than the widely used term “achievement gap.”  Disempowerment is the understory deeper than debates about teaching about racism in the schools, mask mandates or other issues.
There are building blocks for a new movement to promote “democratic deconsolidation” -- educational decentralization and local empowerment of communities, parents, students, and teachers. Here I make a case for such a movement, highlighting Civic Studies as a conceptual framework focused on agency and co-creation, describing the community schools movement and Braver Angels, the movement to depolarize America. I tell a story which suggests a democratic deconsolidation movement can gain political traction across today’s divisions. And I suggest new frontiers of citizen professionalism and pedagogies of empowerment.

The essay in progress, the longer form of a talk to be delivered at the Tisch College of Civic Life on Friday, September 23, argues that Civic Studies suggests an epistemology of agency and a citizen-centered politics, different than the distributive, expert-centered politics which dominates in today's liberalism and social democracy, and also different than the authoritarian politics of identity represented by Donald Trump.

This article draws on 8 years of research involving over 50 church members, clergy, and lay leaders in the United States. The effort began by asking how churches engage in politics, broadly understood, and what might help churches better achieve their oftenstated aims of improving conditions in the communities where they are located. Three primary outcomes emerged from the study. The first was a framework for understanding how churches engage in political work. The second was the finding that deliberative practices can enrich the ways churches engage in political work that simultaneously strengthens democracy and helps churches advance their efforts to improve their communities. Finally, the findings highlighted some of the resonances between democratic and religious life. Naming these resonances can help scholars better understand the challenges of democratic life and provide insights for practitioners working toward a healthier and safer world.

This article focuses on the theoretical and conceptual issues that reside at the intersection of deliberation and action. Looking at the Antigonish Movement and the USDA's farmer discussion groups and schools of philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, the article identifies salient points about the ways in which institutional leaders developed programs that attended to concerns about the role of facts, values, and strategies by embedding deliberative talk within collaborative efforts through education and community development initiatives.

This essay, comparing Pope Francis' climate encyclical Laudato Si' and the field of Civic Studies, argues that both have deep resources for overcoming the despair about democracy and the detachment of professionals and their institutiosn from civic life.

This essay, originally a talk delivered at the Tata Institute for Social Science in Mombai, on December 20, 2016, describes  two dimensions of the work of democratizing societies with a civic agency lens. One involves intellectual or cultural organizing, efforts to create a compelling, hopeful, citizen-centered counter-narrative to the dominant technocratic view of democracy as elections and  citizens as mainly voters. The other involves efforts to deepen and expand free spaces where people develop civic agency, the capacities to work across differences on common tasks.

The talk involved extensive cooperation  with Marie Strom. It came soon after the Trump election, a time when "democracy's signs are flashing red."

This essay, a revised version of a talk delivered at the Tata Institute for Social Sciences' School of Law, Rights, and Constitutional Governance, proposes that the concept of "citizens as co-creators” of communities at every scale including democratic societies holds potential to be a revolutionary idea if taken to scale.  To realize this potential requires recalling earlier intellectual organizing as part of social movements and reviving for our time robust intellectual effort that challenges dominant political ideas. It also means developing the public dimensions of work.

The book under review addresses the topic of equality in US education under the section headings of "ideals," "constraints," and "strategies." I argue that good citizens are people who think about exactly those issues in the style that this volume exemplifies.

This is a draft of chapter four in Pedagogy of the Empowered, a book forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press on Public Achievement and its citizen politics. This chapter describes the rapid growth of Public Achievement from the late 1990s; stories from several very different communities where it took root; the way it doesn't fit in "program models," ideological politics, or conventional categories of youth development.

Pedagogy of the Empowered is undertaken by a team, several of whom co-author chapters and all of whom have been involved in interviewing and/or archival research. We welcome thoughts, stories, criticisms, and also strategies for telling the story. we believe it is of crucial importance to democracy at this moment in the US and around the world.

In this address February 25, 2016, to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, part of a lecture series on "Prioritizing Undergraduate Education at Illinois," I argue the need to move beyond two oppositions now widespread in higher education, which dramatically weaken its linkages to larger publics and thus its power in a time of challenge and change. Beyond "education for global citizenship" versus inward-looking nationalism," I argue for "democratic internationalism," recognizing the importance of mutual learning across all societies which aspire to democratic purposes, practices, and values and also the need for such learning to be grounded in democratic patriotism, a conception of democracy as a way of life co-created by diverse citizens.

Against the common opposition between pressures for career and vocational orientation in higher education, on the one hand, and liberal arts and civic learning, on the other, I argue for "citizen professionalism," preparing our students (and ourselves as educators) to be political agents of democratic and humane transformation of institutions, professions, and community life.

Civic engagement is usually measured as a set of concrete activities, from voting to protesting, that individuals undertake in order to sustain or improve their communities. Higher rates of civic engagement generally correlate with desirable social outcomes. Education and socioeconomic status predict whether individuals participate, but programs that recruit and organize disadvantaged people are effective at boosting their civic engagement. Although it is valuable to know the causes and consequences of these behaviors, the ideal of civic engagement is intrinsically normative, connected to basic debates about what constitutes a good society and a meaningful human life. In the future, civic engagement research should not only be an empirical investigation into concrete behaviors but also a reorientation of research throughout the liberal arts to serve civic ends. That will require more fruitful combinations of empirical, normative, and strategic thinking.

This forthcoming chapter in Eric Fretz, "Climate Change Across the Curriculum" (Rowman and Littlefield) connects climate change and democracy. It begins with the premise that Pope Francis' recent climate encyclical, Ladauto Si', elaborated by a series of speeches in Latin America, represents a broad, comprehensive statement on the human condition of world-historic importance.

This book chapter puts this statement in conversation with the deep popular democratic  political and organizing traditions in the United States, with counterparts around the world.  I argue that an expansive, agentic understanding of democracy as a way of life and the citizen-owned politics ("citizen politics") that is necessary to sustain such an understanding provide vital resources for developing the collective power necessary to address climate change and other mounting global challenges.

Elinor Ostrom's thought offers powerful resources for people who see themselves as active members of communities ("citizens"). In this chapter, I discuss her emphasis on means, not ends; her vantage point as a citizen, not a state; how she deals with value questions in policy; and her work as a complement to deliberative theory and non-violent social movement theory (Habermas and Gandhi).

This is the St. Norbert College Ambassador of Peace Lecture, to be  delivered February 23, 2018 at St. Norbert. I make the case that we need to reclaim citizen-centered democracy; that its erosion has a great deal to do with the loss of the public dimensions of professional work which is now creating a crisis in morale and purpose across many professions, including education. This is the rise of the "cult of the detached expert." A political and change-oriented conception of citizen professionalism holds great potential to catalyze wide democratic renewal. In this frame, all staff and faculty in higher education, where professional identities and practices are rooted, have potential to conceive of themselves as citizen professionals through widespread conversations.

Artist, filmmaker and founder-member of Exploding Cinema, Jennet Thomas, in conversation with Kyran Joughin, London, January 2016. A discussion of Thomas' method, back catalogue and Grundy Gallery Commission, The Unspeakable Freedom Device(2015): Video and BookWorks publication.

This short piece for Huffington Post, adapted from my ongoing conversation with Deborah Meier about democracy in education on Education Week, looks at the resources which the new field of "Civic Studies" holds for democracy in a time of trial.

This speech is the Founders Day Address by Harry Boyte at Oregon State University on the 150th anniversary of the university. It argues that the deep political, social and cultural divisions in the United States are rooted in "knowledge wars," epistemological conflicts, which stymie action on complex problems and also erode public support for higher education. Civic science, as well as civic studies and public scholarship, offer important resources to move beyond the knowledge wars.

At Augsburg College, as in many other higher educational communities, there has been growing conflict and tensions about controversial issues. Yet in the spirit of civic organizing and civic studies, challenges can also be opportunities for collective capacity building.

This faculty development workshop on "Navigating Hot Button Topics,"  as a collective challenge that faculty, students and staff will need to address collectively, draws on both the co-creative process and the content of civic studies and the public work approach to address the challenge.

This blog, posted to Huffington Post, argues that organizing around democratic change in schools and colleges can generate "free spaces" where a plural, citizen-centered politics can take root, and create a hopeful alternative to growing violence and fragmentation.

This essay, written for the Media and Citizenship Project at Rhodes University, argues for a new (and revitalized) public role for journalists as public story tellers, in an understanding of democracy as a way of life built through the public work of citizens. It draws on comparative examples from the US and South Africa.

The emerging field of "Civic Studies" asks “What should we do?” It is thus inevitably about ethics (what is right and good?), about facts (what is actually going on?), about strategies (what would work?), and about the institutions that we co-create. Good strategies may take many forms and use many instruments, but if a strategy addresses the question “What should we do?” then it must guide our own actions – it cannot simply be about what other people ought to do.

This is the abstract for my paper at the Japanese Education Research Association (JERA) Symposium, “Education and Democracy in the Age of Post-Truth,” World Education Research Association 2019 Focal Meeting, The Future of Democracy and Education: Realizing Equity and Justice World-Wide, Tokyo, August 5-8, 2019

New Dimensions of Civic Education in the Age of Post-Truth: Overcoming the Empowerment Gap with Education for Political Citizenship

I argue that addressing the dangers facing democracy and education in the “Age of Post-Truth” requires civic education for politics, in three interrelated dimensions. These include communicative politics which breaks the engineered Manichean binaries in today’s formal political arena, a revitalization of relational teaching as a craft, attentive to dynamics of knowledge power, and an alternative “different kind of politics,” constructive, agentic, and nonviolent, drawing from powerful resources in Scandinavian folk schools and their adaptations, and nonviolent political movements in India, South Africa, and the US.

This response to Cristina Beltrán’s Political Theory essay “Going Public” endorses Beltrán’s effort to sustain a concept of politics as free action by unique agents against the grain of a technicized, marketized world. Beltrán illuminates the “festive anger” of undocumented workers coming out of the shadows of invisibility to
assert their humanity in the demonstrations of 2006. Yet, building on aspects of Hannah Arendt (but neglecting others), Beltrán mistakenly sunders public actions from the organizing work which led up to them. Her argument about labor is confounded by theory and practice of civic agency in broad-based organizations and elsewhere, which teaches the power, freedom, and civic authority to be gained from affirming that people co-create the common world, the commonwealth, through their work, even if not under conditions of their choosing.

This chapter in Herman Wasserman and Anthea Garman, "Media and Citizenship in South Africa," forthcoming HSRC 2017, describes the role of journalists as public story tellers, in a narrative of democracy in which "the people" are at the center. It begins with a quote from C. Wright Mills:

The writers among us bemoan the triviality of the mass media, but why … do they allow themselves to be used in its silly routines by its silly managers? These media are part of our means of work, which have been expropriated from us … we ought to repossess our cultural apparatus and use it for our own purposes.

This interview in the International Affairs Forum, Spring, 2017, now on line, Harry Boyte describes his experiences and theorization of populism in America from the 1960s until today.

The link is here http://www.ia-forum.org/Content/ViewInternalDocument.cfm?ContentID=8726

Boyte begins with an encounter with the Klu Klux Klan in the civil rights movement,  and Martin Luther King's subsequent assignment for him to organize poor whites. He describes his developing theorization of "civic populism," focused on agency and citizen co-creation and responsibility for a democratic way of life and its commonwealth of shared goods, and its differences with traditional ideologies of left and right and also ideological populisms. Civic populism, Boyte argues, has a renewed and growing relevance in the digital age as a citizen politics which can reintegrate information systems and institutions into cultural contexts and human relationships. It reframes issues of many kinds -- education, health, environment, economic development and others - from the state centered liberal question or the market centered conservative question to a civic question.

Pope Francis authored Laudato Si’ as a statement on climate change, and it has provoked intense discussion and debate on climate around the world. The statement’s contributions to the topic are most welcome.1
Yet few have noted the encyclical’s resources for addressing a more general crisis in the contemporary world, a crisis of democracy understood as collective agency.  This crisis erodes human capacities to address a multitude of challenges, from climate change to sectarian warfare, from economic and racial inequalities to public health and educational reform. In this essay, I argue that the encyclical has
significant contributions to make not only for analyzing the crisis but also for catalyzing a democratic awakening. The encyclical, from this vantage, complements the field of civic studies.

James’s essay on “The Moral Equivalent of War” has long been read as either a quaintly naive plan to alter human nature through policy or an insidious scheme for perpetuating norms of male domination under the guise of service. When read closely and in the context of James’s political writings, however, the essay reveals a different purpose: to think creatively across the categories of service and the civic, conjuring a single sphere containing all of the collaborative, co-creative work we do (or should do) with those whose lives affect and are affected by our own. James’s thought-experiment of a universal civil service corps has not been realized in detail or even in spirit, but by recovering his essential idea scholars can help to realize its potential for renewing American civic life by starting in their own sickly vineyard: the academy.

Abstract
http://www.respectfulconversation.net/
The nature of politics Boyte Essay #3
Sunday, December 17, 2017 at 06:19AM |  Harry Boyte
The Colossian Forum is rooted in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, a network with many evangelicals and conservatives. I believe this audience is important to engage in a respectful way. in this time of broad cultural crisis.

In this, my third essay in the Colossian Forum Respectful Conversation series on Reforming Political Discourse on the sub-theme of the nature of politics, addresses the questions raised in Jim Skillen’s second essay about what I mean by “citizen” and his probing the sufficiency of “technocracy” to diagnose civic erosion. Here following I elaborate the meaning of citizen in the public work framework -- the idea of citizens as co-creators -- giving a short genealogy. I also point to common ground: We need to dethrone the default positivism – the culture of detachment from a common civic life -- which has taken hold in professional systems and institutions across all modern societies. “Civic science,” a concept based on citizens (including scientists understanding themselves as citizens) as co-creators, is a workable alternative.