Civic Studies:

Abstract

What is a good citizen? What does a good citizen do and what skills do we want civic actors to practice? Is citizenship, or should it be, tied to the nation-state? How does it change across non-state, local, and global contexts? What beliefs, practices, and skills ought a field of civic studies address? Should the field be geared toward involving people in the current system, particular electoral or formal politics, and/or the marketplace? Should it instead emphasize conflict with or critique of these systems?Questions like these are not currently central to any particular academic discipline and require innovative interdisciplinary rethinking. The emerging field of civic studies, which is organically developing within several academic and political sectors, offers a particularly promising home. This paper illustrates how diverse disciplines can inform civic studies, and how, in turn, the burgeoning research and practice literature of civic studies can contribute to multiple fields.Since 2008, scholars and practioners, activists and theorists have gathered at the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, hosted by the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University and CIRCLE (Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement), to explore building a field of civic studies and to consider central questions a field such as civic studies would have to address. During the Summer Institute's third seminar in 2010, in which all four authors participated, we primarily focused on three central questions, which follow and are the focus of this paper.1.What constitutes a good citizen? To what degree does being a good citizen mean taking part in existing institutions, be they governmental or associational? We looked at Robert Putnam's study of social capital, which takes such measures as voting rates, membership in social and political groups, volunteering, and political donations as possible positive correlations to the presence of certain types of social networks.1 For Putnam, and many political scientists, the good citizen is the one who participates in the system. Few “civic theorists” focused on bare minimum measures of participation like voting, although the “voter turnout” research agenda is alive and well in political science. We also examined competing notions such as the good citizen as one who participates in meaningful, locally-oriented politics,2 the one who advocates that public work become a daily part of Americans' lives, and that this (thick) type of participation is open to all.3 These theorists saw citizenship as supporting (although perhaps also modifying and maintaining) current regimes.Other theorists and seminar colleagues noted the limits of defining a good citizen by willful participation in the system. They saw the good citizen critiquing and challenging existing institutions with an eye towards reforming or even abolishing them. This critical orientation was sometimes aimed at the market, as in the early work of Jürgen Habermas and other political theorists in the Marxist or Frankfurt School traditions who question the normative and cultural role of commodity capitalism.4 It has also been aimed at democracy as currently practiced, as in the deliberative turn in Jürgen Habermas,5 James Fishkin,6 James Bohman,7 Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson,8 and many others. For these theorists, the good citizen participates in and helps facilitate a type of public discussion that serves as a check on the political power of the state and ensures that the outcome is truly democratic. Social justice oriented theorists and community organizers like Myles Horton and Paulo Freire,9 Saul Alinsky,10 and Mark R. Warren11 argued that the good citizen builds relationships with others to have the power to hold authority accountable, taking responsibility for solving problems on their own terms and outside of formal political arrangements.2.To what extent is citizenship rooted in the nation-state, both locally and globally? How does the oscillation between citizenship as participation in and dissent from the system complicate citizenship and nation-state relationships? For some of the “dissenters” in our deliberations, status citizenship tied to a nation-state, whether through birth, naturalization or blood, was bound up in a dangerous nationalism. They wondered if sometimes “participation” can be a cover for imperialistic and dominating practices, as it places a democratic patina on state action, regardless of whether the citizens themselves are involved in a meaningful way in making decisions. There are obvious connections here to concepts of governmentality and surveillance in the work of Michel Foucault,12 Wendy Brown,13 and James C. Scott.14 They were joined in a critique of state-based citizenship practices by an unlikely ally in the form of Friedrich Hayek, who argues that the “spontaneous order” found outside of governmental structures is the best guarantee of human freedom and civic capability.15 Other writers, also sympathetic to capitalism as an organizing force for human behavior, argue that people can and will express and act to improve the world through the market itself. Simon Zadek argues that corporate responsibility is the key to a new social contract through which citizens can meaningfully participate in collaborate governance.163.How can we (scholars and practitioners, theorists and activists) better understand and resolve perceived tensions and a gap between theory and practice in civic studies? Much ink has been spilled on and in this gap, and each participant came to the table with their own preconceptions about their own role. The practitioners were often frustrated with ideas, such as the Habermasian Public Sphere, that seemed overly idealized. They were concerned that many of the theorists lacked a consideration of power in their work, particularly the entrenched systems like the New York City Department of Education or the bureaucracy of the Environmental Protection Agency. They also helped historicize debates, pointing out that some of the persistent tensions in civic work emerge from conflicts between individuals who are indebted to and, to a certain degree, formed by the potentially problematic or even regressive systems that exist. They were also frustrated at times with the very “academic” and sometimes overly scholastic approaches to citizenship as well as the jargon-y nature of some of the theoretical contributions. They seemed most concerned by hints of elitism that might limit rather than expand participation, and disconnect theory from lives lived by everyday people. There were also questions around what applied, empirical research in civic studies would look like. From the more theoretical side of the fence, the resistance of some practitioners to “high” theory could also be frustrating, as theorists saw a deep or abstract understanding of the problems as key to solving them. They expressed concern that too heavy of a focus on the world as it is obscured the possibilities of seeing the world as it could be. They had on their side Roberto Unger, whose argument for experiment at all levels of government elevated the “new” above all that has come before.17 They worried that those enmeshed in work as activists, advocates, public servants and even teachers were overly focused on the narrow, if empirically rich, purview of their own work.What does this cursory examination of these three particular questions show us? First, that civic studies has many links to other disciplines, but is not encompassed by them. Along with bridging the gaps between groups of people already working at similar problems from different angles, civic studies brings a normative challenge to work on these questions (such as voter turnout studies), which assume a certain, static definition of “the good citizen”. It also, as shown best in the question about venues, helps bring to the fore questions about globalization and community and shows that seemingly straightforward practices, such as birthright citizenship or immigration quotas, are bound up in complex moral and political questions both about the future of human community and the ethical duties we have to nationals, non-nations, and even non-humans. Finally, civic studies is shown to advance questions of method in the nebulous world between “facts” and “norms.” For those who work in the humanities side of the social sciences, including those in economic history, political theory, sociology, political economy, anthropology, geography, and even sometimes psychology, the question of how to ground these studies (and what sorts of evidence are meaningful for arguments about human beings) is integral to approaching civic studies and its attempt to blend theory and practice.To give a sense of the diversity of perspectives within the Summer Institute of Civic Studies and the lessons learned, this section includes a short reflection from each of the authors with roots in the essential questions outlined earlier. Staudinger reflects on the tension between theory and practice; Dawley-Carr discusses the broad array of citizenship definitions and orientations that are used in the field of civic studies, and their implications for the classroom; Pappas considers participatory democracy as it relates to accountable autonomy; Cohen discusses the community-based participatory research approach as a way to intertwine civic studies and public health.As a political theorist studying democratic citizenship, social movements, and activism, I was well within my comfort zone attending the Summer Institute of Civic Studies. So I was humbled and surprised to find the Institute and its participants a challenge to my preconceptions of what my work could be. I began to question many of the assumptions I had had about research, the relationship between theory and practice, and my role as a teacher, and this questioning continues to define my work as I transition from graduate student to assistant professor.The Summer Institute of Civic Studies attracts engaged, passionate people from fields often completely closed off from one another. I would have been intimidated, except that everyone was committed to supporting and learning about one another just as much as competing or showing off. At first the willingness to be wrong, or to revise one's ideas in light of a discussion seemed like a lucky break, but I began to see that this principle of openness ran through to some of the work we were reading. In the deliberative turns of Jürgen Habermas and other deliberative democrats like Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, enacting and developing procedural norms which allow for a public sphere to form, one that is, to some extent, protected from the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and profession, is a key aspect of democratic citizenship. The members of this cohort developed and policed these norms, although we also asked about types of voices that might not be recognized in this sort of space, such as that of emotional, religious or unschooled speakers.We also asked whether deliberation can leave active participants on the outside.18 For some of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies members, a daily grind of hundreds of pages of dense reading and discussion was a new or barely remembered experience. While to a certain extent the graduate school members of the group colonized the activists, the activists and practitioners always seemed ready to step in with an intervention. This intervention was usually an invocation of their own experience working within federal agencies, civic advocacy or teaching, and was convincing because it made no broad claims about universal reason or ideal theory; rather, it sought to show how the theories we read could be challenged, and as a result amended or opened up to experience. If Young worries that the activist and the deliberator are hopelessly disconnected, the Summer Institute of Civic Studies puts them in the same room.Closely connected to this, I began to question my assumption about what made academic work admirable or convincing. As a political theorist in a strangely humanist sub-discipline in the midst of a social science, I proudly supported the practice of reading the old, the dead, and the ancient to look for insights into our contemporary political condition. Armed with a sharp critique of the reductionism of social science techniques imported from the hard sciences and economics, and along with a dose of disdain for statistics, my research design previously consisted of “read books”. While I have not become a statistician, the Summer Institute of Civic Studies helped me realize that theoretical development of ideas needs to be linked to studies of actual historical and contemporary phenomena and interactions in order for them to count as research, at least in the civics field. When the claims we make are about engagement, happiness, connection, or community, these claims cannot be made in a vacuum.How did these elements come to change my dissertation project? Before the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, I had developed a project centered on a reading of the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Montesquieu. Its topic was, and is, democratic citizenship and the possibilities therein. However, the bulk of the essay sought to play theorists off of each other and off of their major commentators, synthesizing this discussion into a new conception of citizenship. My fellow Summer Institute of Civic Studies attendees forced me to rethink my notion of what made a good dissertation and good research.I have also begun to question the role of the teacher in terms of his or her civic capacity, particularly in relation to citizenship that dissents. I have long defended teaching in terms of its normative goal of offering students the tools to be critical consumers of information and to develop their political judgment, but I worry that sometimes civic engagement boils down to participating passively in existing institutions, essentially accepting them as they are. Deep engagement with the emerging literature of civic studies has committed me to orienting my classes around projects and problems that push students to see themselves as “co-creators” of the common world, and indeed to engage in some of that creation as part of the course. Critical thinking is now linked to critical political practice in my mind, and this guides my pedagogy and course design. If we take civic studies seriously, it needs to be reflected in our teaching as well as scholarship.Throughout my global experiences in education, both as a student and a classroom teacher in three countries, I have been struck by young people's creativity and resilience in response to the complex worlds in which they live. My students are adept in multiple languages and dialects, and maintain strong roots in multicultural homes and communities. Their rich lives sparked my interest in exploring the nature and depth of their civic participation and ultimately led me back to graduate school to study youth citizenship formation. Questions that have shaped my graduate study include: How do young people learn to be active participants in their communities?19What part can schools, families, and neighborhoods play in helping young people become aware of their roles and responsibilities as civic actors? What role do values play in civic education?I entered the Summer Institute of Civic Studies with these questions in mind, hoping to broaden my understanding of the possibilities of civic education as well as to learn more about its foundational theories. Ensuing discussions of civic capitalism, civic environmentalism, and participatory budgeting recalled practices I had observed and engaged in while living in Eastern Africa and Latin America, but that I had not witnessed in the United States.20 My fellow seminar participants shared personal stories from their respective fields and professions, extending our deliberations beyond theory and practice to meaningful self-reflection. This experience lessened the dissonance I have traditionally noted between U.S. and international contexts, and further, it mirrored the reflexivity I believe to be essential in youth civic education programs that aim for active, justice-oriented citizenship.My dissertation research focuses on civic education in Cuba, where a triangle of schools, families and neighborhoods work in tandem to support young people's civic development. Policies from the 1980s reinvigorated a focus on values inculcation across all levels of schooling.21 The national government plays a central role in determining classroom curricula and instructional methods, teacher recruitment and training, and professional development. Currently, the government has identified core values22 that it embeds throughout all subjects. Curricula highlight historical figures believed to embody target values and teachers and parents are expected to model these values as well. In addition, students are encouraged to participate in community-based service projects, school-based volunteer work, student organizations, and off-campus student study circles.23Recalling our “Civic Studies, Civic Practices” conference activity, I was curious to make comparisons between the U.S. and Cuba's approaches to civic education. In U.S. schools, civic education views citizen formation as an “open question,” allowing for a wide variety of citizenship orientations. Nevertheless, this openness is passive: civics classes typically highlight procedural political knowledge, social skills, and the importance of voting but not much more. Curricula and pedagogy traditionally do not engage students in explicit deliberation about what kind of citizen they want to be and why, nor do they push students to think about civic values as the foundation of citizenship-building and civic engagement. Values are considered contentious territory and as a result, are treated implicitly.24 True to an ideologically Democratic lens, students have the right not to participate civically or politically in society. In fact, choosing not to participate is largely considered an expression of civic life.In contrast, Cuba's civic education model approaches civic formation as more of a “closed question,” narrowly defining what constitutes a “good citizen.” Yet civic values are explicitly defined, promoted, and practiced. Youth are encouraged to view the world through an ideologically Socialist lens and to practice dedication, responsibility, and solidarity through convivencia (shared living): trading food, clothing, appliances, advice, and time in extensive neighborhood networks. Cuba's model can be easily regarded as indoctrination. While a closed approach raises interesting normative questions, I found a more appealing research agenda in exploring how young people negotiate state-sponsored civic values in their everyday lives. My study shows that values formation in Cuba is not a one-directional process, highlighting the ways in which young people accept, reject, and redefine civic values in their schools, homes, and neighborhoods.Of the countless lessons I have learned in Cuba, I found that the joint work of teachers, parents, and community members to raise future citizens is complex and contradictory, not unlike in the United States. For Cuban youth, citizenship formation is a negotiated process, one that is contextual and requires a constant effort to balance personal needs with responsibility to the collective. A focus on civic values in Cuba roots young people in thinking about and enacting their rights, roles, and responsibilities in and to society. The United States has much to learn from this model. If as civic studies teachers, activists, and researchers we seek to expand and connect already established civic venues and theory, we must also create spaces for international comparisons and conversations.In early February 2010, when I submitted my application to participate in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, I had just observed one of the largest meetings ever held in New York City on the status of public schools. Two weeks prior, on January 25, 2010, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDoE) held a public hearing concerning the 19 school closing proposals it had introduced.25 Three thousand people—including parents, teachers, students, community residents, elected officials, and school alumni—filled the auditorium to capacity to demand that the NYCDoE not close their schools. Public testimony proceeded for nine and a half hours as more than 300 speakers unanimously testified that school closings were not an adequate solution for struggling schools. Nevertheless, at 3:30 am, the Mayor's advisory body, the Panel for Education Policy (PEP), approved each of the 19 school closing proposals. It was a moment that illuminated central tensions in between policy makers and the public in a democratic society: tensions in expertise and in power.The Summer Institute of Civic Studies provided me with sets of literatures and frameworks I had not yet consulted; it also granted me an opportunity to delve back into some theories that I was familiar with and read them again with my dissertation in mind. Habermas' theory of communicative action clarified that both school and community leaders in New York City were more invested in a strategic win than in mutual understanding.26 But I still wanted to understand the elements of a public process that would encourage deliberation.Fung's case studies about participatory democracy structures set up by the Chicago police department and public school system initially impressed me because they challenged the notion that large urban bureaucracies could not establish the institutional terrain for community voice and influence in decision-making.27 Fung demonstrated that two mechanisms of accountable autonomy: opportunities that invite civic actors to deliberate with officials, and then the work of the state to document and disseminate the results of those interactions enhance local civic participation in decision making and transparency of the decision making process and create accountability from the bottom-up.This definition of “bottom up” accountability differs significantly from the definition advocated for by community organizing groups, and the one that I was primarily thinking about with regard to my dissertation data. Anchored in the intentional work of building power among people disenfranchised from the political process, organizing groups cultivate local knowledge and shared interests to wield outside pressure to hold the political process and decision-makers accountable.28 At the epicenter of community organizing analysis and action is power—the role power plays in transforming individual concerns into collective demands, and ultimately the role power plays in pressuring policymakers to account for and succumb to those demands. Fung's work and other civic studies frameworks we discussed at the Institute persuaded me to focus on the responsibility of the state to create the conditions for “bottom-up” accountability, and particularly in my dissertation to revisit the invitation extended to the public through the school closing hearing process. I noticed that my previous understanding of “bottom-up” accountability did not take into account the role of the state much at all, as I was concentrating more on the actions of politically disenfranchised groups. Moreover, my previous framework for “bottom-up” accountability understood accountability as the “powerless” gaining power over the “powerful”—not as a process in which both the public and policymakers seed the groundwork for public participation in decision-making.In the end, applying a civic studies lens allowed me to expand my investigation of the conflicts over school closings between policymakers and the public and to consider the power of trust in creating “bottom-up” accountability. As I've discussed, it inspired me to reconsider the direction of “bottom-up” accountability—and to focus on the state's responsibility to create institutional terrain for such “bottom-up” accountability to occur. Finally, it helped me to re-imagine how a different kind of a hearing process might lead to different set of policy decisions (decisions that I can imagine would not only be more effective but) that would build the civic capacity of community members and professionals alike.In my previous work in epidemiology conducting a community-based participatory health survey in an urban community burdened by environmental injustices,29 my colleagues and I wanted to support participatory and justice-oriented democratic citizens.30 We were interested in building community leadership capacity by offering residents real opportunities to actively engage in the research: designing the study, offering feedback on data analysis, and being involved in information dissemination. Although we were not educating for citizenship within the classroom setting (as Westheimer and Kahne are), our work could be seen as education, rooted in the Freire's conception of education to support marginalized groups organize and mobilize;31 from studying Alinksy32 and others, I could understand where our own work was situated on a spectrum within the history of community organizing. Similarly, by having some of the residents who participated in our survey host data meetings at their homes (meetings where we discussed our preliminary research findings and sought feedback based on community members' hypotheses) we were building social capital.33 As demonstrated through these examples, theories discussed in civic studies served as fundamental roots of our community-based participatory epidemiology research. But the theoretical foundations for my applied work only became apparent upon participating in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies; delving into civic studies offered an opportunity for self-reflection and the creation of an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to ground my work.As we envision future directions for the emerging field of civic studies, it is important to highlight possible opportunities for merging the theory of civic studies with the methods of more applied and empirical disciplines as we seek to resolve current gaps between theory and practice and help support “good citizens”. Community-based participatory research offers one particularly promising methodology that operates at the nexus of civic studies and epidemiology.As we have discussed, civic studies can complement and strengthen the theory and practice of diverse disciplines. Yet as we continue to build the field of civic studies, key questions emerge. Should civic studies attempt to develop itself as a formal discipline, or remain a research sub-field spread across different disciplinary spaces? Arguing that civic studies should be a discipline is not about gaining a department status within a university, or abandoning the diverse methodological and ideological approaches fostered therein. Rather, it is an argument that there is a “there” there—a group of practitioners, researchers and even elected officials who are seeking to learn and practice citizenship democratically. A discipline of civic studies would move this work from silos to some sort of common space, in particular, a common space where research and theory are articulated in a way that is accessible to a broad range of citizens, particularly those with little academic training.Along with co-creative citizenship that values every citizen, the Summer Institute of Civic Studies frames itself around “a commitment to the public good”. In all of our work, this commitment was both central and contested, given the complex levels at which this commitment to political community could be explored and expressed. In essence, this concern is to focus on ends, rather than instrumental means, and requires institutional design arranged towards these shared ends. To have a sense of the common good, or to foster it, required us to ask whether the historical separation of theory and practice is bridged by interdisciplinary dialogue, or are the practitioners and theorists left convinced that each knows something the other does not? More darkly, how do the common person and the common good stand up to entrenched systems that do not reward civic spirit?Most fundamentally, we must identify how academics, teachers, policy professionals, politicians, corporate leaders, activists, and community members can support the creative work of citizenship. Civic studies is not a code word for civic boosterism, or public service; it critically analyzes the real, hard work of citizenship and power itself. Done right, it should be alarming to at least some elites. But it is also about dialogue in a pluralistic society, and an attempt to find constructive solutions for common problems. From considering civic theory and civic practice to examining civic venues and civic skills, we work to develop civic studies as a discipline in its own right. We open the debate to discussion here, as we seek to deepen, challenge, and enjoy the conversation surrounding the nascent field of civic studies.