Public Work Philosophy

The essay for the journal Freedom Schools, published by the University of Texas in association with the Texas HBCU Democracy Schools Alliance, recounts some of the history of Black democratic education which was their foundation. It describes several current descendants of the citizenship/freedom schools which add dimensions and resources. It concludes with an argument for a new effort toward a “commonwealth of freedom,” the phrase of Frances Parker, a great 19th century Black poet, educator, journalist, and organizer. Her compelling vision weaves together vital democratic threads in American culture with powerful relevance today.

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

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.

In today’s political climate—dominated by division, privatization of public goods, and deepening distrust—what alternatives do we Americans have? This essay describes a profound resource in America's civic history: commonwealth politics—a tradition rooted in the idea that citizens are central in caring for the public good, also known as “the commons.” I am eager for discussion, debate, and strategy for moving this theme into the public discussion.

The Center for Democracy and Citizenship based at the Humphrey Institute (how School) for Public Affairs joined with immigrant groups and others to organize "the Jane Addams School for Democracy" as a modern day settlement in 1996. It drew strongly on the commonwealth tradition in America, based on local commons as well as republican government, as well as the citizenship school tradition of the civil rights movement. This account is taken from Harry Boyte, Everyday Politics, University of Pennsylvania Press 2004.

This statement, by Harry Boyte and Elizabeth Hollander, president of Campus Compact, was commissioned by a group of higher education leaders meeting at the Wingspread Retreat Center in December, 1998. It reflected the public work approach to civic engagement, exploring how the civic and public dimensions of faculty and other professionals in higher education might be revived and enlarged. It also reflects the powerful desire for such civic renewal of professional identities and practices found among senior faculty across departments and disciplines at the University of Minnesota in 30 interviews in 1997.

We have to get beyond expert cults and aggrieved communities if we want to develop civic agency, the capacities of people and communities to solve problems and to generate cultures that sustain such agency. Community is the living context for evaluating expert knowledge. But without engagement with diverse ways of knowing, appeal to community knowledge can produce a know-nothing reaction to the larger world. Sustained interaction between different kinds of knowledge requires re-conceiving of institutions as living communities and dynamic cultures, with norms, values, practices, and patterns that can be changed.

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.

STATE AND SOCIETY is a lecture delivered to Sociology students of The University of Burdwan. It actually deals with three basic concepts in Political Theory and Political Sociology, namely STATE, SOCIETY and NATION. In his “Principles of Social and Political Theory” (1951) Earnest Barker has beautifully explained these concepts. This lecture follows Barker’s analysis. The lecture will be useful to students of Political Theory and Political Sociology.

This talk to Huston-Tillotson University  takes off from Melvin Roger’s seminal concept of “aspirational citizenship.” It is exactly the idea we need to address this moment of crisis in our society and our democracy. It reclaims the idea of the citizen from those who would use it as a way to bludgeon immigrants and attack even birthright citizens born in America as un-American. It reclaims the idea of citizen as an identity¸ a plain on which all are equal. The HBCU Democracy Schools Alliance holds potential to put the idea of citizen professional into practice.

This annual publication serves as a forum for new ideas and dialogue between scholars and the larger public. Essays explore ways that students, administrators, and faculty can initiate and sustain an ongoing conversation about the public life they share.The Higher Education Exchange is founded on a thought articulated by Thomas Jefferson in 1820: "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education."In the tradition of Jefferson, the Higher Education Exchange agrees that a central goal of higher education is to help make democracy possible by preparing citizens for public life. The Higher Education Exchange is part of a movement to strengthen higher education's democratic mission and foster a more democratic culture throughout American society.Working...

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,

This essay argues that fulfilling the promise of participatory democratic theory requires ways for citizens to reconstruct the world, not simply to improve its governance processes. The concept of public work, expressing civic agency, or the capacity of diverse citizens to build a democratic way of life, embodies this shift. It posits citizens as co-creators of the world, not simply deliberators and decision-makers about the world. Public work is a normative, democratizing ideal of citizenship generalized from communal labors of creating the commons, with roots in diverse cultures. Shaped through contention with forces which threaten shared ways of life and their commons, grounded in an understanding of human plurality, public work has political qualities that unmask sentimentalized civic discourses of modern elites. Public work places citizens, not markets or states, as the foundational agents of democracy. It opens a path beyond the political crisis.

This essay, originally a talk to the Tata Institute for Social Sciences (TISS) Mumbai, India, December 20, 2016,  has beeen edited to highlight the need for developing a nonviolent civic politics across national boundaries  in our age. Here I show parallels between America's Black Freeedom Movement and the nonviolent movement for Indian independence.

This essay by Trygve Throntveit, Tania Mitchell, and me introduces a forthcoming special issue of The Good Society, the journal of the Civic Studies field. The issue (Vol. 32:1-2, 2025) includes an account of Civic Studies as field, brief descriptions of the articles, and a statement by the authors of implications for democratic transformation of higher education.

Appeals to civility may seem quaint and old-fashioned in our moment of democratic crisis. Many on the left see it as unacceptably conservative, a regressive tool of “respectability politics” (Cherry 2021; Eltahawy 2019). Similarly, those in the far right, “post-liberal” Catholic movement known as “Integralism” describe civility as a misguided obstacle to the power politics they practice (Ahmari 2019). Meanwhile, right-wing authoritarians like Donald Trump replace civil rhetoric with threats to use state power to punish rivals and persecute critics, whom Trump describes as the “enemy from within” (Hubbard, Rosen, and Huey-Burns 2024). Presumably, gestures of unity and tolerance have no place in such apocalyptic politics. Is civility obsolete? On the contrary, we believe it’s a vital resource for civic renewal in challenged democracies.

Our civic fabric could be further torn by mass deportations of immigrants without formal legal papers. The great majority of undocumented immigrants contribute peacefully as citizens of their communities, workplaces, and schools, even if they do not hold legal status. While borders have been in chaos and immigrants with criminal records may warrant deportation, progressives and conservatives alike have contributed mainly polarizing rhetoric to the debates on what to do. Bipartisan policies to stabilize the borders and create accessible paths to legal citizenship are crucial. In the meantime, how are families, teachers, co-workers and employers of immigrants to respond to the possible deportation? Nonviolent tactics and also nonviolent philosophy provide effective resources for action.
Here is the link to the article, "Colleges as Educational Commons," which describes the way today's nonviolence as resistance has a zero-sum view of power, as domination.
https://www.academia.edu/71552553/Boyte_Colleges_as_Educational_Commons

On Wednesday, January 10, the American Federation of Teachers and the Albert Shanker Institute cosponsored a panel moderated by AFT President Randi Weingarten on the role that American education should play in responding to the threats confronting our democracy. Two leading public intellectuals, Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and the author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, and Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and the director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, discussed the importance of civics education in preserving our republic and sustaining the American ideals of liberty and democracy. Below is an excerpt of their wide-ranging conversation. –EDITORS

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.

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.

In the age of what Gert Biesta calls subjectification, "the uniqueness of each individual human being," the promise of citizens-as-subjects is to break with the ideal of the "good citizen" whose identity is inscribed by state and market. Making such a break involves "exposure to the experiment of democracy," in Biesta's view. This essay argues that the promise is real but the danger is that subjectifi cation becomes "identity politics" which erode the responsibility of citizens for society as a whole and generate 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 the collective, self-organized work of building society (which is a concept of the citizen which predates the modern state); and politics as pluralist, negotiation across differences. State-centered theories of democracy and associated ideas of the citizen and politics form the dominant paradigm today. Despite problems in Japanese political education such as passive instructional pedagogies, this essay argues that there are powerful resources in Japan's civic life and cultural history to push back against the dominant view and lay foundations for a paradigm of democracy as society. There is also current evidence of a shift from civic attachment to insular communities, bonding social capital, to what many theorists call "bridging social capital," which I argue is better described as pluralist citizen politics. The essay describes the experiment in democratic pedagogies and conceptual innovation of a new paradigm at Tokai University. It calls for international collaboration on this paradigm of citizen-centered democracy.

The usefulness of evaluation has in recent years been explored through a wider backdrop of conversations regarding the professionalization of evaluation practice. The discourse on professional evaluation has been largely circumscribed around two models of professionalism – social trusteeship and technocratic professionalism. Drawing on the works of Albert Dzur, Thomas Schwandt identifies a third model of democratic professionalism which promises a more purposeful discourse; a means of rendering the usefulness of evaluation as part of a civic professionalism in terms of what Henry Boyte calls ‘public work’. Whereas mainstream democratic professionalism emphasises the need for deliberation, the idea of public work emphasises the democratizing ideal of co-creativity with the active involvement of evaluators and citizens as co-agents of change. According to Schwandt, what is missing is an appropriate framework for justifying democratic professionalism as the ethos for professional evalu...

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.

Though prominent in the CoVid-19 Task Force lineup on television, Dr. Deborah Birx was often overlooked in the controversies about Donald Trump's tweets, but she played a key role in the early days of the pandemic. The high regard in which she is held by scientists and leaders in pandemics led Vice President Pence to appoint her to coordinate government response to CoVid-19, Her presence illustrated the re-emergence of an "all hands on deck" approach to work in health, a different citizenship than simply voting or volunteering. .

This report on the convention of Braver Angels, June 27-29, shows its success in developing highly effective methods for helping people overcome their stereotypes of others and, broadly, overcoming "affective depolarzation." The discipline and respect and sense of civic responsibility BA generates was evident in the ability the organization to begin with an enormous debate watch party on June 27, in which equal numbers of "reds" and "blues" were similarly dismayed by the spectacle of the presidential debate - and felt a similar sense that citizens will have to step up to address the country's political dysfunctions.

The BA platform passed overwhelmingly in this year’s convention, highlighted the idea of citizens at the center of democracy:
“Civic renewal … requires citizen-led action on common problems. Such action usually begins at the local level and strengthens local cultures of citizenship, while enhancing democratic patriotism and love of country. Civic action builds civic muscle — our capacity to work together across our differences — and in so doing, creates hope. It returns citizens to the center of the democratic way of life.”

Americans are losing hope: specifically, that distinctive, civic hope that their own choices and actions can meaningfully and positively shape their communities’ futures. In the face of such hopelessness, we recall the words attributed to the late Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter: “In a democracy, the highest office is the office of citizen.”

The outcomes of the 2024 elections are hardly irrelevant to such fears; they have rarely mattered more. But whatever returns in November, the return of civic hope—and with it, the future of our democracy—depends on the return of the as a productive builder of the commonwealth.

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

Reviews dominant models of thought that value disciplinary knowledge over the civic and moral authority of non-academic, community-based knowledge. Calls for developing people's and communities' capacities to organize, solve problems, and sustain agency

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...

In the age of what Gert Biesta calls subjectifi cation, "the uniqueness of each individual human being," the promise of citizens-as-subjects is to break with the ideal of the "good citizen" whose identity is inscribed by state and market. Making such a break involves "exposure to the experiment of democracy," in Biesta's view. This essay argues that the promise is real but the danger is that subjectifi cation becomes "identity politics" which erode the responsibility of citizens for society as a whole and generate 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 the collective, self-organized work of building society (which is a concept of the citizen which predates the modern state); and politics as pluralist, negotiation across differences. State-centered theories of democracy and associated ideas of the citizen and politics form the dominant paradigm today. Despite problems in Japanese political education such as passive instructional pedagogies, this essay argues that there are powerful resources in Japan's civic life and cultural history to push back against the dominant view and lay foundations for a paradigm of democracy as society. There is also current evidence of a shift from civic attachment to insular communities, bonding social capital, to what many theorists call "bridging social capital," which I argue is better described as pluralist citizen politics. The essay describes the experiment in democratic pedagogies and conceptual innovation of a new paradigm at Tokai University. It calls for international collaboration on this paradigm of citizen-centered democracy.

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).

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.

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 professionals and politicians, as providers of services and solutions to partners, educators, and organizers 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 governments 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 produ...

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.”

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.

This essay, comparing and drawing from Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato SI and the field of Civic Studies, argues for a different kind of politics, "Civic Politics," the name of the founding statement of Civic Studies. It differs from protest politics and partiaan politics.

The piece complements an earlier draft of the essay comparing Pope Francis' view of politics with the politics of the Civic Agency youth initiative called Public Achievement. Here's the link https://www.academia.edu/15499127/Pope_Francis_Blue_Labour_and_the_Citizen_Politics_of_Public_Achievement .

This article examines the role professionals can play in expanding the concept and practice of democracy. It argues that the ways professionals are usually socialized to understand their work identities and practices displace or even suppress the popular agency of lay citizens and this has contributed significantly to the shrinking of democracy, since professionals play outsized roles in shaping the institutions of today’s knowledge societies. Professionals’ transformation into citizens who catalyze citizen energies and talents and work as citizens with
other citizens is key to broadening the role of citizens from voters and volunteers, to co-creators and civic producers who are responsible for a democratic way of life. Beginning with a discussion of ways in which the “technocratic paradigm” has detached institutions and professional practices and identities from civic and community life and shrunk understandings of democracy, the article examines traditions of public work and citizen professionalism in America, which are important to recall and translate to new circumstances. It presents several case studies and concludes with suggestions of citizen professionalism as a new frontier for higher education and democracy.