Free Spaces

On February 21, 2017, I delivered the Hamm Lecture to Oklahoma State University. The talk ties today's idea of citizen professional to the old land grant tradition of professionals as part of the life of communities.

LIke those in Historically Black Colleges and Universitie they were "on tap not on top" not outside obervers and critics. Communities as a whole -- not a separate professional class - built civic institutions and infrastructure.  Renewing such a conception of colleges, professionals, and civically grounded institutions of all kinds will be key to wide civic revitalization.  For parallel traditions in HBCUs see this talk to Huston-Tillotson University, "All on an Equal Plain."

https://www.academia.edu/127192806/Boyte_All_on_an_equal_plain

This post on the website of the Center for Economic and Learning at Ball State University announces a new CIvic Studies minor at BSU and describes the field of Civic Studies, its background, and the "civic politics" it promotes. Civic politics expands democracy, citizenship, and the meaning and role of professions

Encounter-type devices have been introduced to solve one of the main drawbacks of common haptic interfaces i.e. their limited transparency in free space and their restricted ability to render realistic transitions between free space and contact. Advantageously, encounter-type interfaces collide with fingers and display interaction forces only if a contact occurs in the virtual environment. In free space, their end-effectors are mechanically detached from the operator and closely track his fingers, allowing for a perfect transparency. This paper introduces a control scheme that handles the transition between tracking and force display modes in a smooth way. Experimental results using a custom encounter-type interface are also given. The obtained results show the efficiency of the proposed control law when compared to the conventional switch-based control usually found in the literature.

This dissertation is the first scholarly study to comparatively analyze the mutinies of Anglo, immigrant and African American soldiers in the Union Army. Those collective and individual military protest actions were part of the war's capacity, in the words of historian David Blight, to "unleash, reinforce, and reshape nineteenth century values and attitudes." I contend that mutinies reveal Civil War volunteers who possessed a conception of soldier rights derived from membership in free associations and the citizenry's long history of local control. While republicanism and the market contributed a language and ethos, it was native-born Anglo soldiers' real practice of self-government in peacetime that led them to demand its continuation in the interstices of military law during wartime. At the same time, though hardly acknowledged by Anglos, northern free blacks took part in the associational and print culture of their day and conceived of themselves as active citizens. Their military protest actions continued their practice of II "NEVER MORE COMPLETELY DUPED": MEMBERSHIP, SOLDIER RIGHTS, AND MUTINY IN THE ANDERSON CAVALRY .

This dissertation is the first scholarly study to comparatively analyze the mutinies of Anglo, immigrant and African American soldiers in the Union Army. Those collective and individual military protest actions were part of the war's capacity, in the words of historian David Blight, to "unleash, reinforce, and reshape nineteenth century values and attitudes." I contend that mutinies reveal Civil War volunteers who possessed a conception of soldier rights derived from membership in free associations and the citizenry's long history of local control. While republicanism and the market contributed a language and ethos, it was native-born Anglo soldiers' real practice of self-government in peacetime that led them to demand its continuation in the interstices of military law during wartime. At the same time, though hardly acknowledged by Anglos, northern free blacks took part in the associational and print culture of their day and conceived of themselves as active citizens. Their military protest actions continued their practice of II "NEVER MORE COMPLETELY DUPED": MEMBERSHIP, SOLDIER RIGHTS, AND MUTINY IN THE ANDERSON CAVALRY .

Over the last decade, ever-increasing polarization has exacerbated political divisions threatening both the civil sphere and democracy itself. In the United States, concern over democracy's future has led to the growth of self-described bridgebuilding organizations. Bridgebuilding brings people from across the political aisle together for dialogue with the aim of lessening polarization. This paper examines bridgebuilding through a detailed case study of one such organization. Drawing on observation, interviews, and participant surveys, the study describes the motivations and experiences of bridgebuilders. The paper finds that bridgebuilding allows participants to "rehearse civility" experiencing the civility and goodwill they crave in their own lives and desire for the broader society in a relatively safe and controlled setting. Rehearsing civility invites participants to invoke the civil-reaffirming social bonds, speaking to a broader sense of goodwill, in turn rehumanizing their political opponents. Though not without its limitations, the growth of bridgebuilding highlights a deep desire for civility and the experiential and affective pleasure it allows. Civility as mutual regard and as bonds to democratic institutions is considered.

This essay analyzes the roots and implications of America's broken higher education system, focusing on how decades of policy choices – culminating in structural decisions by the Trump administration and earlier governments – have exacerbated the turmoil. It takes an analytical and philosophical tone, probing not just the symptoms (soaring costs, low completion rates, waning learning outcomes) but the underlying "invisible" assumptions that have guided higher education. In particular, we explore how the system's failure to cultivate critical thinking and engaged citizenship imperils American democracy. Conversely, we consider how higher learning can reorient democracy toward its higher purpose: to produce aware, thinking citizens in a free society. Drawing on forward-looking scholars and thinkers, from John Dewey to Martha Nussbaum, and integrating Wallace's "water" metaphor, the essay articulates a vision for a genuine educational philosophy beyond institutional inertia. The stakes are high: nothing less than the vitality of democratic life in America depends on remaking higher education into a force for enlightenment rather than an engine of inequality and confusion.

В представленной статье рассматриваются актуальные проблемы, стоящие перед тувинцами-тоджинцами – коренным малочисленным народом Российской Федерации, сохраняющим традиционную систему жизнеобеспечения. В рамках статьи дается краткий обзор процесса законодательного закрепления за тувинцами-тоджинцами статуса коренного малочисленного народа. Отмечается, что впервые тувинцы-тоджинцы были признаны малочисленным народом Севера в 1991 г., но из-за распада СССР так и не воспользовались своими правами. В этой связи в 1990-е годы тувинцы-тоджинцы пережили серьезные социально-экономические потрясения. Статус
коренного малочисленного народа тувинцев-тоджинцев был заново подтвержден в 2000 г. В статье показаны пути самоорганизации тувинцев-тоджинцев – создание их первых общин и общественных организаций. Отмечается, что устремления тувинцев-тоджинцев, их общин и ассоциации во многом схожи с чаяниями других коренных малочисленных народов. Обращается внимание, что тувинцы-тоджинцы озабочены своим тяжелым положением, характеризующимся высоким уровнем безработицы, низкой продолжительностью жизни, спадом традиционных отраслей хозяйства. В статье указывается, что тувинцы-тоджинцы в последние годы сосредотачивают свое внимание на защите своих индигенных прав и переносят акцент с вопросов возрождения культуры на решение социально-экономических и политических проблем. Прежде всего, тувинцы-тоджинцы как коренной малочисленный народ, живущий на своей родной земле, считают важнейшей задачей закрепить свои права на исконные земли. Также они ратуют за возрождение оленеводства и стремятся обладать правом практиковать традиционный образ жизни во всей возможной полноте.

This essay argues that higher education can regain public trust, forge vital, reciprocal relationships with communities, and help to awaken democracy as a way of life if colleges and universities become "filled with the democratic spirit." Renewing the democratic spirit on a large scale requires recovery of the public and civic dimensions of professionals' work in higher education, which is central to shaping the culture of colleges and universities. The essay describes the transformation of professional identities from "civic" to "disciplinary," fed by the logic of instrumental rationality, the resulting crisis across the sweep of modern professions, and the development of the theory of public work and citizen professionalism at the University of Minnesota and later at Augsburg University as a response. Finding enthusiasm about the idea at the 2024 CUMU conference and drawing on case studies from many different settings and disciplines, the co-authors wrote this piece to speak to the potential for citizen professionalism to spread as a theory of public action and set of democratic practices with large positive effects.

We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken'd…a great word, whose history remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted." Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (2003, p. 427) A democratic society requires a democratic people with the habits, knowledge and dispositions to work together across differences to address common challenges and negotiate a shared way of life. Today, as the challenges our democracy faces are multiplying, democratic capacities are diminishing. We need a new way of doing business -and developing ourselves as heirs and architects of the great word, "Democracy." Science was once widely understood by practitioners and the larger citizenry as a wellspring of democratic energy and a constellation of democratic practices (Jewett 2012). Today, many fields of science are generating an explosive increase in our knowledge about the world. But the democratic energies and practices of science have receded from view. At the same time, society is beset with "knowledge wars"; politics is bitterly polarized; people feel powerless; and skepticism about public, economic, and civic institutions has dramatically increased. We are in danger of becoming a nation of democracy's spectators, not democracy's co-creators. We are convinced that civic science-scientific inquiry that offers opportunities for participants to develop their capacity to work across differences, create common resources, and build a democratic way of life-offers hope beyond this impasse. Civic science is a framework and set of democratic and scientific practices that bring citizen scientists and lay citizens together in ways which build respect, that enhance capacities to act, and that generate positive public outcomes. In the report below, we describe three case studies which show that civic science can bridge enormous differences. For instance, the Family Education Diabetes Series (FEDS) initiative, a supplement to standard health care for members of the American Indian community in the Twin Cities, addresses diabetes. Chronic conditions such as diabetes can be considered "wicked problems"-problems facing society that are daunting in their complexity. Such problems often generate high distrust between scientists and minority cultural groups (Fadiman 1997). FEDS was created through collaborative work between health scientists and providers and the Indian community-from early efforts in relationship-building and establishing mutual respect and trust, to brainstorming the program's design, educational foci and format, public visibility, implementation, and ongoing modifications. Quantitative evaluations of FEDS have found significant improvement across key objective diabetes-related measures (e.g., weight, metabolic control). Qualitative evaluations (conducted within the culturally-consistent context of talking circles) have also found that the community-owned nature of the program-and the social support and interpersonal accountability that this encompasses-is perceived as the principal driver of these improvements and change . Building on such case studies, this report is a working document for the National Science Foundation Civic Science Workshop, October 2-3, 2014. We provide an overview of what civic science is. We describe several case studies on grand challenges of our day-sustainable agriculture, the achievement gap in education, and challenges of health care-which show commonalities of how to put civic science into action. Part of the workshop will explore and analyze these lessons, as well as a forthcoming case study on climate change. More broadly, we will examine obstacles to civic science in our funding, educational, and policy systems. And we will strategize about how obstacles can be overcome, and how we might organize an international civic science community of practice as a way to address the grand challenges of our time and awaken the potential of our democracy.

Schranz for feedback and discussions on this essay and its themes. It also draws extensively from the work of the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP), a yearlong alliance of colleges and universities, associations, and others, launched at the White House on January 10, 2012, to work with the administration in strengthening higher education as a public good. I'm grateful also to the leadership team of Tim Eatman,

I begin by observing the way in which the encyclical and civic studies both address the “crisis of democratic faith” through emphasis on “the priority of culture,” against the grain of today’s intellectual fashion. Culture, in this sense, involves settings and practices through which citizens develop civic agency, capacities for self-organizing work across differences to solve common problems, create common resources, and make a democratic way of life. The essay then takes up three value commitments shared by both the encyclical and civic studies -- agency, the primacy of culture, and public work.

The Citizenship Schools of the Civil Rights Movement illustrate an understanding of democracy as a way of life and citizens as co-creators. This view and its tradition has many roots in communal labor practices around the world (see Boyte, "Constructive Politics as Public Work" Political Theory 2011) and appears as a foundation for Civic Studies, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_studies

This  talk at the Social Justice Forum at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis builds on a speech Marie Ström and I gave as part of the venerable lecture series called Friday Forums at the University of Illinois' YMCA. Our theme was that we need a new understanding of democracy, "democracy 3.0," as a way of life.

This talk elaborates with the example of the South African anti-apartheid struggle as well as the American civil rights movement. It makes the case for a new story of democracy, arguing that what is called "the crisis of democracy" is not simply an American issue.

I tell the story mainly from the vantage of citizens, not government or politicians, drawing from the centuries old struggle of African Americans to "realize the promise of democracy" and from other movements like the South African freedom movement around the world for an inclusive democracy.

It concludes with President Bill Clinton's State of the Union speech, The New Covenant, in 1995, which had been shaped in part by presentations Benjamin Barber, the political theorist, and I made at a Camp David meeting on the future of democracy shortly before. The New Covenant told the story of democracy as a way of life and government as a partner with citizens, not acting for or on them.

My argument in this talk, given with Marie Ström to the YMCA at the University of Illinois as one of its hallowed (97 year old) Friday Forum series, is this: we are at the beginning of democracy 3.0 as relevant in the US as in Africa. Democracy 1.0 can be conceived as the spread and consolidation of representative democracies in Europe, Asia and former colonies. Democracy 2.0 was the emergence of representative democracies which emerged after the fall of communist dictatorships in Eastern and Central Asia. Democracy 3.0 is democracy as a way of life with strong and empowered citizens. This is a global challenge. There are many lessons to be learned from other societies. To elaborate, I take up three ideas:
• Aspirational citizenship.
• “Free spaces,” institutional settings where people develop independent relationships that are public, beyond private life and, and develop power, confidence, civic leadership and hope.
• A new public narrative about democracy which centers on the people.

Robert Putnam has made an important contribution by drawing attention to the evidence that we are in the United States, increasingly, “bowling alone.”  His detailed account of declining participation of Americans in many forms of political and civic organizations is both an achievement in social science and a wake-up call for civic renewal. Social capital, for Robert Putnam and others, furnishes the indispensable background for democracy to work.  Putnam defines social capital as “networks, norms, and trust…that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives.”  In his recent book, building on his earlier article, Putnam argues that citizens develop social capital especially through participation in groups like religious congregations, voluntary associations, fraternal and professional groups, service and recreational organizations.  As Americans spend less time in such groups, social capital is eroding.  With its erosion the prospects for democracy are endangered.

Yet social capital is insufficient to address the challenges of democratic renewal in the 21st century because it neglects the public and political dimensions of experience. Critics have intimated this by pointing to the limits of social capital in terms of questions of exclusion. By itself, for instance, social capital as a concept fails to differentiate between relationships that are reactionary and parochial such as racist organizations in the United States (or South Africa), and relationships that connect communities across lines of difference in racial, ethnic, religious and other terms.

This keynote address at the Ball State University Civic Learning Symposium makes the argument that higher education needs to recover and spread the "commonwealth spirit" at the heart of the civil rights movement and the democratic history of higher education

This lecture at Texas A&M addresses the convocation theme of student contribution to the university and the larger community.

To stress the idea that students not only learn but contribute sounds innocuous enough. Who doesn't want to contribute? But it goes against powerful forces in our culture-citizens as consumers, defined by needs and wants, not civic producers, creators of the commonwealth. Political Leaders play on this constantly, appealing to the worst angels in our nature.  Sustained productive citizenship means developing collective confidence and capacity to take on the challenges we face together. This involves a rebirth of productive citizenship for rebuilding the commonwealth.

O ver the past several years, "school wars" around polarizing issues, such as critical race theory, school closings, and mask mandates, have galvanized conservative activists across the nation to get involved in school policy-riddled with contradictions and armed with dubious facts about curriculum, school policies, and public health. Through this misinformation and, in turn, mistrust, these interactions can lead to alienating and counterproductive schoolcommunity relationships. An added challenge is the role of powerful special interest groups and bad actors who deliberately sow the seeds of divisiveness in pursuit of a narrow agenda, further isolating educators, parents, and most importantly, students from working toward more comprehensive educational and civic goals. As a result, many K-12 educators and policy makers may want to avoid engaging around these complex and contentious issues with the public, hoping they will magically go away or slide past schools to the next destination. Undoubtedly, undergirding this hope-though not often directly stated-is the belief that schools are technocratic spaces run by specialized experts, immune from the politics of an unruly public. This sense of objective detachment is embodied in many school policies, practices, and reform movements, best represented by the unfortunate quip from former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe during a 2021 gubernatorial debate: "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach" (Vozzella & Schneider, 2021). There is another way schools can understand their public purpose. This alternative may be more difficult and messier, but it

Entendendo a importância da eficiência dos projetos padronizados, principalmente os destinados a públicos com características programáticas bastante específicas como crianças, delimitou-se como objeto de pesquisa a creche-escola Presidente Tancredo Neves, localizada no bairro do Barro, na cidade do Recife-PE. O objetivo principal foi utilizar os instrumentos da Avaliação Pós Ocupação (APO) aplicados a um tipo de projeto padrão, disponibilizado pelo sistema Proinfância, um programa público de escala nacional que visa a construção de equipamentos educacionais a fim de melhorar a qualidade da educação pública oferecida a infância. Foram utilizados como métodos de investigação a Observação assistemática, Walkthrough, Questionários, Entrevistas e Mapas mentais. O trabalho buscou explicitar a importância do projeto para infância, pois ele pode comprometer atividades pedagógicas e o desenvolvimento infantil. A análise dos resultados apontou que o projeto padrão da creche necessita de alterações para melhorias do seu desempenho térmico e mudanças formais, como alteração na implantação dos blocos. Entende-se também que a difusão de pesquisas e experiências em APO contribui para um melhor entendimento da vivência e interação do homem com o espaço construído, para a atuação dos profissionais e estudantes de arquitetura e urbanismo e áreas afins, além do estímulo a novas investigações na área.

The debates about service learning are not merely internecine squabbles between educators over methods and manners of out-of-class instruction. Or at least they don't have to be. For they reflect and are implicated in broader debates about community service and civic education more generally, as well as about citizenship, public policy, and even our understandings of American democracy and history. Take a couple of snapshots of these broader debates, now and then. Throughout 1995, the national service initiative-AmeriCorps-became a sacrificial offering by the Republican leadership on the altar of a balanced budget. The question allegedly was whether government should be in the business of "promoting voluntarism": whether, in particular, AmeriCorps members should get paid for what citizens are supposed to do anyway on a voluntary basis. This rendering of what was at stake with a national initiative of this kind illustrated how much had been lost from understandings of "service"-and of citizenship itself. The debate about AmeriCorps and voluntary service can be contrasted with the public and political overtones that once existed in service initiatives like the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s and early 1940s. The Corps enlisted over three million young men, mainly poor and unemployed youth from rural areas and small towns, in public projects that ranged from contour farming to building dams, bridges, and national parks. Veterans from the CCC-men now in their late 70s or 80s, of all political persuasions-continue to meet all across the country, in commemoration of what for many was the transformative experience of their lives. 1 There was never a question about whether CCC members should be paid. Indeed, monthly stipends of $30 a month were enough to support most members during the Depression. Service was understood to be work with civic overtones and implications: determined, hard civic effort to produce a public good, to meet critical public challenges. These traditions and understandings continued. For instance, in the early 1950s the wellknown educator Lewis Mumford warned about the rise of a bureaucratic, narrowly technical civilization and the loss of an ethos of citizenship based on public work. In The Conduct of Life-what he called the "culmination" of his career-Mumford argued that "our present civilization lacks the capacity for self-direction because it has committed itself to mass organizations and has built its structures from the top down, on the principle of all dictatorships and absolutism, rather than from the bottom up." Mumford believed technological civilization was "efficient in giving orders and compelling obedience and providing one-way communication; but it is. .. inept in everything that involves reciprocity, mutual aid, two-way communication, give and take." To counter such trends, Mumford proposed a "public work corps" which would put each young man and woman to work "doing a thousand things that need to be done, from planting

Developments in public affairs that stress governance—not simply government—hold possibilities for reframing democracy. Governance intimates a paradigm shift in the meaning of democracy and civic agency—that is, who is to address public problems and promote the general welfare? The shift involves a move from citizens as simply voters, volunteers, and consumers to citizens as problem solvers and cocreators of public goods; from public leaders, such as public affairs profes-sionals and politicians, as providers of services and solutions to partners, educators, and organiz-ers of citizen action; and from democracy as elections to democratic society. Such a shift has the potential to address public problems that cannot be solved without governments, but that govern-ments alone cannot solve, and to cultivate an appreciation for the commonwealth. Effecting this shift requires politicizing governance in nonpartisan, democratizing ways and deepening the civic, horizontal, pluralist, and pro...

We need a wide-ranging debate about the question, "what does citizenship mean in the 21st century?" I am convinced that we need bold, savvy, and above all political citizens and civic institutions if we are to tame a technological, manipulative state, to transform an increasingly materialistic and competitive culture, and to address effectively the mounting practical challenges of a turbulent and interconnected world. Political citizens require, in turn, a politics that is based on the assumption of plurality, widely owned by citizens, and productive. Such a politics, drawing simultaneously on older conceptions of politics and also adapting politics to the rapidly changing contours of an information age, is different than the conventional, state-centered, distributive politics of left and right. The work of John Dewey, a pioneering theorist of knowledge and democracy, is useful as a takeoff point for thinking about citizenship and politics, both for its strengths and for its limits. Dewey sought to extend the democratic project as America changed from a society of small towns and rural life to a technological, urban, professionalized nation. He made several major contributions that point toward a different view of citizenship and, implicitly, a different politics. Dewey had a deep respect for ordinary citizens that is sorely needed today among intellectual and professional groups. He advanced conceptions of situated inquiry and the social nature of knowledge that challenge contemporary academic detachment. He held a view of knowledge production as a democratic power resource that suggested a democracy of abundance, not of scarcity, different than zero-sum distributive power or the competitive, consumer culture. Here, he anticipates both the power dynamics of the information age and the need to break the stranglehold over our political imaginations produced by marketplace ways of thinking. Finally, Dewey had an understanding of education as a vital process of work and engagement, connecting students with the world, creating public spaces for democracy. Dewey's views are by no means unproblematic. He acquiesced in understandings of civil society that removed it from "politics," if he did not invent them. As a result, his conceptions of citizenship, community, and democracy often have an abstracted and idealized quality. I will argue that to renew and extend Dewey's vision, we need politics.

The Greeks who invented the word democracy placed popular power, not voting, at the center. As the classical scholar Josiah Ober shows in his essay “The Original Meaning of Democracy,” democracy for the Greeks did not mean voting. It meant, “the empowered demos… not just a matter of control of a public realm but the collective strength and ability to act within that realm and, indeed, to reconstitute the public realm through action.” When the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville travelled American in the 1830s he found this meaning of democracy alive in the vibrant forms of association which Americans created. In contrast to France, where people petitioned the King to solve problems like alcoholism, in America people organized to solve it themselves, sometimes with government as a partner. “In democratic peoples, associations must take the place of the powerful particular persons,” he wrote in the classic, Democracy in America. Tocqueville argued that collaboration among citizens “is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.”

In this article, I address the gap between social movement studies and popular education studies. In addition to problematising this gap, I suggest that by theorizing community-based sites of popular education as ‘free spaces’, scholars can better investigate how the knowledge-making practices at play within these sites can work to actively promote the reproduction of movement-based strategies, tactics, meanings and identities. From such a conceptualization, researchers can better explore the question of how local-level sites of popular education bolster the influence of social movements in society, thus shedding important light on the broader socio-political outcomes of popular education programs.

We need to "return the citizen" as the most important role in a democracy, as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter put it.

This requires a much larger larger story of democracy and citizenship than the one dominant today, but a narrative with rich and deep roots throughout the history of the country. 

This is a narrative that is simultaneously “federalist,” recognizing the importance of public governance, and “popular,” emphasizing the independent agency and authority of the people. It also involve “civic” dimensions with structures, policies and civic-minded politicians that connect popular energies to government.

In their recent film, "Rustin," Barack and Michelle Obama highlight not only the great movement organizer Bayard Rustin but also a little-noted aspect of the March on Washington: it made Black citizenship visible. Dignified, disciplined, and nonviolent, the marchers were civic examples needed in our time of bitter polarization and Washington dysfunction.

This 1981 piece from the journal democracy argues that populism, understood in democratic and inclusive terms, is a different paradigm of politics that left wing and Marxist approaches because its foundational answer to the question, "who makes change?," is the cultural concept of "the people," in all their complexity, not class or other catetories which come from the ways people are organized in modern technological and market-oriented societies. I argue that key to populism's democratic potential are "free spaces" where people engage each other in sustained, roughly equal ways which build civic agency, or collective capacity to act across differences.

Chris Brink, one of South Africa's leading mathematicians and a major figure in South Africa's educational transformation from apartheid, has written this important book, The Soul of a University, which deserves wide discussion among educators, administrators, policymakers, students and the broader public. His argument is that universities need what he calls an 'orthogonal axis'-a focus on what they are 'good for' in addressing the problems of society, in addition to the conventional assessments of what they are 'good at', i.e. disciplinary research. This type of university, which he calls the 'civic university', supports 'challenge-led research…responsive to the challenges faced by civil society, globally, nationally or regionally'. Such responsiveness requires 'civic engagement as another core function of the university', in addition to 'what they are good at' (p. 286).

One of the largely undiscussed roots of democracy's crisis in the US and around the world is the detachment of research universities from the civic life of communities.

This piece, in "The Conversation," describes the South African Challenge.

South African higher education remains remarkably detached from society. Its loss of a social purpose can be seen as the erosion of the public and civic vitality which once fuelled the anti-apartheid struggle.
Today, its mission has shrunk. Why is there this disconnect?

The answer is simply that policies and incentives disadvantage the deep connection with the communities in which universities are located. They also emphasise peer-reviewed articles in internationally ranked journals as the measure of excellence. And they lead to a focus on educating students for high-paying jobs. They have little to do with positioning the welfare of society at the core of their scholarship, teaching, and public connections.

Put differently, higher education in the country doesn’t fulfil its civic potential. It has no real social purpose. This essay describes the problem and suggests models for developing solutions.

Science is not value neutral. It depends on democratic values of cooperation, free inquiry, and a commonwealth of knowledge. This report on a National Science Foundation conference in 2014 begins an integration of the civic science philosophical framework with democracy.

This thought piece, drawing on a lively discussion with colleagues in the Institute for Public Life and Work, Braver Angels, the Inter Movement Impact Project, and the HBCU Democracy Alliance, is written for democracy thought leaders, civic entrepreneurs, and organizers.

I argue that to inspire a discouraged citizenry and energize a renewal of democratic progress, we need to understand how democracy’s meaning has shrunk, recall the citizen-centered and civically empowering strands of democracy in America, build on today’s civic stirrings and find new ways to connect popular agency, politics, and electoral politics.

We need to tell a different story of democracy as a way of life and government as our partner and resource, neither savior nor enemy.

A acessibilidade depende das condições ambientais e arquitetônicas que impedem ou facilitam o deslocamento para alcance da informação e o envolvimento nas atividades cotidianas. Neste sentido, trata-se de um dos fatores de inclusão dos indivíduos no processo de aprendizagem e no estabelecimento das relações sociais (DISCHINGER; et al, 2009). A acessibilidade espacial nas escolas e consequentemente, a inclusão escolar deveriam considerar as diferenças entre os alunos, implicando, entre outros, em escolas com infraestrutura ergonômica e operacional compatíveis com a capacidade de as diferenças diferirem, mas com efeito, alcançarem um modelo universal, com o mínimo de exclusões.

We need a wide-ranging debate about the question, "what does citizenship mean in the 21st century?" I am convinced that we need bold, savvy, and above all political citizens and civic institutions if we are to tame a technological, manipulative state, to transform an increasingly materialistic and competitive culture, and to address effectively the mounting practical challenges of a turbulent and interconnected world. Political citizens require, in turn, a politics that is based on the assumption of plurality, widely owned by citizens, and productive. Such a politics, drawing simultaneously on older conceptions of politics and also adapting politics to the rapidly changing contours of an information age, is different than the conventional, state-centered, distributive politics of left and right. The work of John Dewey, a pioneering theorist of knowledge and democracy, is useful as a takeoff point for thinking about citizenship and politics, both for its strengths and for its limits. Dewey sought to extend the democratic project as America changed from a society of small towns and rural life to a technological, urban, professionalized nation. He made several major contributions that point toward a different view of citizenship and, implicitly, a different politics. Dewey had a deep respect for ordinary citizens that is sorely needed today among intellectual and professional groups. He advanced conceptions of situated inquiry and the social nature of knowledge that challenge contemporary academic detachment. He held a view of knowledge production as a democratic power resource that suggested a democracy of abundance, not of scarcity, different than zero-sum distributive power or the competitive, consumer culture. Here, he anticipates both the power dynamics of the information age and the need to break the stranglehold over our political imaginations produced by marketplace ways of thinking. Finally, Dewey had an understanding of education as a vital process of work and engagement, connecting students with the world, creating public spaces for democracy. Dewey's views are by no means unproblematic. He acquiesced in understandings of civil society that removed it from "politics," if he did not invent them. As a result, his conceptions of citizenship, community, and democracy often have an abstracted and idealized quality. I will argue that to renew and extend Dewey's vision, we need politics.

In August, 2020 in San Francisco, everyone, and every restaurant, was just trying to survive the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, three clear plastic domes popped up in front of Hashiri, a Michelin-starred Japanese restaurant on Mint Plaza; Hashiri's manager explained to reporters that these domes ensconcing wealthy diners were chosen to keep unhoused neighbors out of sight and out of the way. Around the corner, unhoused San Franciscans slept in tents on the sidewalk. Tents and domes alike create private space in public on public land, but the city's emergency policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic legitimized only the rights of businesses and wealthy customers to privatize Mint Plaza for commerce and enjoyment. In this study of Hashiri's domes on Mint Plaza, I recount a story of the San Francisco government re-entrenching the rights of wealthy restaurant-goers to enjoy, inhabit, and make profit on public space, while neglecting unhoused residents on the same block.

We need a wide-ranging debate about the question, “what does citizenship mean in the 21st century?” I am convinced that we need bold, savvy, and above all political citizens and civic institutions if we are to tame a technological, manipulative state, to transform an increasingly materialistic and competitive culture, and to address effectively the mounting practical challenges of a turbulent and interconnected world.  That requires, in turn, a politics that is based on the assumption of plurality, widely owned by citizens, and productive. Such a politics is different than the conventional, state-centered, distributive politics of left and right. John Dewey can help us, but he does not have all the answers.

Despite the widespread disgust at a discouraging election, there are many lessons about a citizen-centered view of democracy emphasizing the agency of the people from the civil rights movement, including how to think about the role of politicians. This is an essay I wrote for Bill Moyers site before the election in 2016.

The opinion piece, taking off from the film about Bayard Rustin, describes the Black dignity, calm, and civic leadership of the everyday citizens who marched on August 28, 1963, and the long developing sense of nonviolent, public citizenship which shaped it.

Librarians are on the front lines of today’s partisan and civic conflicts, fueled by fragmentation in ways different groups of citizens know the world, shattering of common agreement about what it means to be an American, and loss of human connections across different epistemic communities. This essay argues that concepts of public work and its expression in citizen professionalism and the idea of nonviolent civic politics developed through decades of organizing and educational public work in the black freedom movement are profound resources for library professionals to use in addressing such conflicts. The essay describes the little-known movement of Jeanes Teachers who organized black communities to build thousands of Rosenwald libraries and schools , created interracial alliances in the Jim Crow South, and pioneered nonviolent practices that developed crucial civic leadership of the civil rights movement. Their pedagogical, political, and relational skills feed into a constructive nonviolent philosophy with lessons for librarians today and resources for a larger vision of constructive politics that can shift today's Manichean, us versus them dominant narrative.

Drawing on respective ideas from within both liberal political philosophy and Frankfurt School critical theory, this paper seeks to examine claims about autonomy and empowerment made on behalf of educational policies such as teacher-led codeswitching; a policy that seeks to empower students from racially marginalised groups by facilitating their proficiency in the language and cultural expressions of societally dominant groups. I set out to evaluate such claims by first sketching two competing formulations of autonomy; namely, (a) liberal autonomy concomitant to political power, and (b) autonomy that arises out of the practice of critical self-reflection. I proceed by testing codeswitching within each formulation to reveal how-in this case-these two conceptualisations of autonomy are educationally incompatible with each other. I conclude by suggesting that educational interventions such as codeswitching may ultimately be complicit in the longer term processes of racialisation and marginalisation that they seek to diminish, not only because they carry the potential to damage minority students' self-integrity, but also because they limit possibilities for both majority and minority students to engage in dialectical encounters that may open avenues to new principles of social and political organisation. If civic empowerment is our goal, then educators need to teach minority students to 'codeswitch': to represent and express themselves in ways that members of the majority group-those with political privilege and power-will naturally understand and respect. Students should learn that in every community there is a language and culture of power. If one wants to be effective through political dialogue … one must master and use that language and those cultural expressions. (Levinson 2012, 87

Drawing on respective ideas from within both liberal political philosophy and Frankfurt School critical theory, this paper seeks to examine claims about autonomy and empowerment made on behalf of educational policies such as teacher-led codeswitching; a policy that seeks to empower students from racially marginalised groups by facilitating their proficiency in the language and cultural expressions of societally dominant groups. I set out to evaluate such claims by first sketching two competing formulations of autonomy; namely, (a) liberal autonomy concomitant to political power, and (b) autonomy that arises out of the practice of critical self-reflection. I proceed by testing codeswitching within each formulation to reveal how-in this case-these two conceptualisations of autonomy are educationally incompatible with each other. I conclude by suggesting that educational interventions such as codeswitching may ultimately be complicit in the longer term processes of racialisation and marginalisation that they seek to diminish, not only because they carry the potential to damage minority students' self-integrity, but also because they limit possibilities for both majority and minority students to engage in dialectical encounters that may open avenues to new principles of social and political organisation. If civic empowerment is our goal, then educators need to teach minority students to 'codeswitch': to represent and express themselves in ways that members of the majority group-those with political privilege and power-will naturally understand and respect. Students should learn that in every community there is a language and culture of power. If one wants to be effective through political dialogue … one must master and use that language and those cultural expressions. (Levinson 2012, 87