Civic Science and the Grand Challenges of the 21st Century

In today’s blog post, you’ll learn about new and emerging work being done in the field of “civic science.” This specific work emerges out of an initiative of the American Commonwealth Partnership, which in turn spun out of ADP’s Civic Agency initiative with Harry Boyte and the Center for Democratic Citizenship. Civic science, developed over a number of years, is a mode of inquiry and action which integrates scientific approaches and other ways of knowing with civic agency and democratic practices. It seeks to address “grand challenges” like climate, health, early childhood education, and sustainable agriculture while simultaneously deepening democracy. Below is an overview and a short description written by two principal investigators, Gwen Ottinger and Nick Jordan. The civic science initiative has also launched a website with case studies and other background materials: http://civic-science.org/. Happy reading!

A Call to Action:
Civic Science and the Grand Challenges of the 21^st Century
A White Paper for the National Science Foundation Workshop

Sherburne Abbott, Harry Boyte, William Doherty, Nicholas Jordan, Tai Mendenhall, Gwen Ottinger, Scott Peters, & John P. Spencer

“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

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 (Mendenhall et al., 2010, 2012).

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. 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.

What is Civic Science?

Gwen Ottinger & Nicholas Jordan

Civic science is a method of inquiry into important contemporary issues that enriches democracy by bringing citizens from all backgrounds and disciplines – not just scientists – together in shared projects that analyze current conditions, envision a better future, and devise a pathway to that future. Civic science is both an approach to generating knowledge and a democratic practice. In civic science, scientists express democratic citizenship through their scientific work: they engage in democratic world-building efforts as scientists. Such efforts include democratic projects in which broad-based civic groups are working to impact complex problems in, for instance, agriculture, education, and health care, the three areas emphasized below. By linking scientific work to these democratic efforts, scientific inquiry expands, taking a crucial civic role. The fundamental scientific question of “how does the world work” is situated in the context of democratic inquiry into a critical question—“What should we do in the face of complex problems?” Civic science, thus, integrates its work closely with the “purposive” disciplines of arts, humanities, and design, which ask fundamental questions about what is good and just, encouraging us to envision and debate ways of relating and living as civic agents.

Civic science is like “transdisciplinary” science (e.g., NRC 2014), but expands and enriches such frameworks by closely linking the practice of science to democracy and to other ways of knowing and learning from arts, humanities and design traditions and fields. Similarly, Civic Science is like community based participatory research (CBPR) and social movement-based “citizen science” in that it focuses on complex, pressing, real-world problems, and values diverse ways of knowing. However, in ways that usefully challenge theory and practice in CBPR, civic science intentionally and explicitly aims to promote democracy by framing scientific inquiry as an opportunity for participants to develop their capacity to work across differences, create common resources, and negotiate a shared democratic way of life.

As a democratic and scientific practice, we argue civic science has the unique potential to advance public deliberation, collective action, and public policy on pressing issues like energy security, climate change, sustainable agriculture, poverty, and health care. These and other “wicked problems,” require not only the insights of numerous academic disciplines and situated knowledge, but also approaches to governance that are not paralyzed by uncertainty and can adapt to new information as it emerges.  Effective approaches to wicked problems must also explicitly engage purposive questions such as “what should we do?” to work through political stalemate. Civic science’s combination of knowledge production and democratic practice is thus clearly called for.

Civic science draws from research and theory in three areas: science and technology studies (STS), civic studies, and complex systems theory.  Together, they provide the rationale for civic science and point to the benefits of pursuing civic science as an approach for furthering knowledge and democracy.

Science and technology studies argues that values are inherent in all scientific inquiry (e.g. Sarewitz 2004) and demonstrates that knowledge, ways of knowing, and the research efforts of non-scientists can contribute meaningfully to our understanding of wicked problems (e.g. Corburn 2005; Fischer 2000).  This line of thinking establishes the need for policy-relevant science to be a collaborative, transdisciplinary effort.  We argue that more recently emerging fields, which rely heavily on co-production of knowledge, such as “sustainability science,” demonstrate these tenets.

Civic studies posits that “civic agency” is essential to a well functioning democracy. This field—which includes not only the social sciences but also the humanities and political philosophy—views citizens as co-creators of civic life and stresses their collective capacity for negotiating and shaping social and political environments (Ostrom 1990; Calhoun 1992; Boyte 2011; Tufts Civic Studies Institute Curriculum 2013; Levine 2014).  Civic studies provides a framework for conceptualizing how scientific inquiry can serve as a democratic practice, and for theorizing about the contributions of scientific practice to democratic culture.

Complex systems theory provides a framework for characterizing wicked problems and holds that adaptive and foresight-based governance approaches, in which scientists are central participants, are necessary to make progress on them (Liu et al. 2007). This theory strongly underscores the necessity of employing a democratic, agency-building approach to science in order to confront wicked problems.

References

• Boyte, H. (2011). Constructive Politics as Public Work: Organizing the Literature. Political Theory 39(4), 630-660.
• Calhoun C. Ed. (1992). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Civic Studies Curriculum (2013). On web at http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/research/civic-studies/summer-institute/.
• Coburn, J. (2005) Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
• Fadiman, A. (1997). The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision Between Two Cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
• Fischer, F. (2000). Citizens, Experts and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge . Durham: Duke University Press.
• Jewett, A. (2012). Science, Democracy and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Levine, P. (2014). We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Whitman, W. (2003). The Portable Walt Whitman. New York: Penguin.

For more on Civic Science, go here: http://civic-science.org/.

What We’re Reading: “Working Together”

Making Work Public: a reflection on Cynthia Estlund’s “Working Together”

By Harry C. Boyte

Today’s dominant understanding of citizenship in higher education, as elsewhere largely focuses on what is called “civil society,” the arena of community and voluntary groups which are seen as separate from work. A recent story illustrates how widely higher education’s training of professionals to think of themselves as “outside citizenship” has spread.

When the Center for Democracy and Citizenship recently partnered with the City of Falcon Heights, Minnesota, to organize and moderate a “citizen town hall” on citizen-based approaches to gun violence, the audience of 25 or so in the Town Hall included the mayor, the police chief, the city manager, teachers, a local principal, social agency workers, four students, business entrepreneurs – and two elderly residents. The residents expressed regret that “there are so few citizens.” No one from any of the worksites in the community raised any questions about their definition, although when I did so it prompted a lively conversation

The focus on associational life and civil society takes discussion of institutional change off the map. It is fatalistic, assuming the impossibility of re-invigorating the public cultures and purposes of institutions such as higher education, as well as professional systems, businesses, and government.

But fatalism about work and workplaces is challenged by the careful studies of legal scholar and civic theorist Cynthia Estlund. In earlier writings and most extensively in her path-breaking book Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy (Oxford, 2003), she brings together a wealth of theoretical perspectives with a large body of social science research and examples from popular culture in order to remedy what she sees as the neglect of work and the workplace by communitarian and civil society theorists who focus on associational life.

Estlund studies many different kinds of workplace and notes wide variation, from “social capitalist” settings which seek to facilitate civic connections across differences to low wage and often highly  coercive settings, where job security is nonexistent. For all the differences, overall she makes a compelling case that, despite continuing patterns of hierarchy and discrimination and large needs for change, workplaces are still the only environments where most people are likely to have sustained encounters with people of differing racial, cultural, and ideological backgrounds. They also engage in such experiences with relative civility, and around practical, goal-directed tasks, making them relatively conducive to sustained experiences of collaboration.

Her evidence shows that these features of work and workplaces enable people to develop enhanced respect for others, reduce their prejudices and stereotypes, build trust, develop civic skills, and create cross-group networks. Estlund observes that “It is not just the friendship potential of workplace relations that makes it a promising source of interracial contact.” The work process itself “is generally cooperative and directed toward shared objectives; much of it is sustained, personal, informal, and one-to-one.” Workplaces further democratic equality by “convening strangers from diverse backgrounds and inducing them to work together toward shared objectives under the aegis of the societally imposed equality principle.”  She concludes with a strong challenge to civil society theorists:

“Contrary to the thrust of much of the growing literature on civil society, civic engagement, and associational life, workplace ties do many of the things that civil society is supposed to do. Those ties provide a medium for the cultivation of empathy and a sense of belongingness, of ‘social capital’ and habits and norms of cooperative and reciprocity, of civic skills of participation, communication, and compromise, and of conversations that enrich public discourse. The fact that they cultivate all these qualities, skills, habits, and feelings in an environment of relative diversity and even compulsory integration makes the workplace a central and uniquely important component of civil society.”

Estlund also shows how U.S. social movements such as union organizing efforts in the 1930s, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and the feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s made the workplace more open and public. Thus, Section 7 of the Wagner Act, in part the product of New Deal reform and organizing, created “a kind of rudimentary system of civil liberties within the workplace” which in turn allowed further organization and action by workers. The equal protection of the law provision, enshrining in words “the notion that people should not be segregated or subordinated on the basis of their race or certain other immutable traits” was the result of civil rights efforts.

Though the effort to democratic the workplace is far from completed, this rich history also shows large possibilities for  democratic change. These include broad changes to “make work more public” in our colleges and universities.

Harry C. Boyte Director of the Center for Democracy and CItizenship at Augsburg College, is a partner with ADP in the Civic Agency Initiative.

UMBC’s Sparrow Point Project

The University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Sparrows Point Project was recently featured in the Baltimore Sun. David Hoffman, UMBC’s ADP Campus Coordinator and Assistant Director for Civic Agency spoke to the Sun about how the project — and UMBC’s larger Breaking Ground initiative  (see previous blog post) — are advancing the university’s efforts to prepare students for informed, engaged citizenship:

“How can we prepare students to work together and see the world as open to transformation through their actions?” said Hoffman, one of the program’s leaders. “Every experience students are having reinforces the sense that they can take responsibility for recognizing problems and initiating solutions in their communities.”

Read a segment of this front page story below, and find the full story here.

Excerpt from the Baltimore Sun:

UMBC students use new media to document a dying industrial past

They are preserving Sparrows Point history through website, film

By Julie Scharper, The Baltimore Sun
8:00 p.m. EST, February 11, 2013

Now, with the  [Sparrows Point steel] plant closed and machinery being sold for scrap, Bartee and other steelworkers are teaming with University of Maryland Baltimore County students and professors to record their stories. The students are making a website and helping with a documentary to preserve the history of the plant….

Much as pieces of massive machinery have been carted away from the plant in recent weeks, the history of the mill — once the region’s economic hub — is in danger of disappearing. But two UMBC professors and their students aim to preserve the stories of 20th-century manufacturing using 21st-century techniques….

The project is part of the university’s Breaking Ground initiative, which aims to empower students to develop and implement solutions to challenges that surround them. David Hoffman, UMBC’s assistant director for civic agency, said the university wants to shatter students’ conception that citizenship occurs in discrete bursts in the voting booth or volunteering projects….

The Sparrows Point project, Documenting Cultural Heritage in Partnership with Communities, is a collaboration between an American studies professor, Michelle Stefano, and a new media studio professor, Bill Shewbridge. The students in their two interwoven courses use traditional methods for exploring the past, such as transcribing oral histories, while employing the latest technology to record and share those stories.

Read more.

The Power of Public Narrative: Harry Boyte in the HuffPost

This is a re-post of Harry Boyte’s recent opinion piece in the Huffington Post. Harry has been a long-term partner of ADP’s civic agency initiative. Here Harry writes eloquently about the power of campus-community partnerships and the need for colleges and universities to be participatory citizen-agents in their communities — conceiving themselves as part of a community, rather than standing apart as “partners with,” yet other than (better than?) the community.  Plus the piece talks about my hometown — Utica, NY! — Jen Domagal-Goldman, ADP National Manager

Re-posted from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-boyte/college-community-partnerships_b_1917951.html

Hope and Higher Education — The Powers of Public Narratives

By Harry Boyte

What happens when colleges become “part of” communities, not simply “partners with” communities, overcoming the culture of detachment that took hold in higher education after World War II, described by Thomas Ehrlich, a pioneer of civic engagement?

Such a shift means colleges and universities act as anchoring institutions, part of the “barn raising” which Nancy Cantor recently called for. In barn raising, colleges help communities to address challenges ranging from economic development to school reform.

In some cases re-integration of colleges, their staff and students into places can lead to even more expansive change. When colleges and universities and their members take on the role of “agents and architects of democracy,” envisioned in The Wingspread Declaration in 1999, the process can generate new public narratives through which communities are able to re-imagine their futures.

There is a rich if largely unknown history which shows the potential. And there are examples today, like a consortium of colleges and universities in upstate New York, working with towns to spark a renaissance of the region, using the rubric “Rust to Green.”

In years of researching effective citizen action, I have often been struck by the powers of public narratives. In Brooklyn in the 1980s, East Brooklyn Churches, an African American community organization, launched the nation’s most ambitious low-income housing effort. The key was a new public narrative.

Community residents, using the story of the Old Testament leader who led the people in rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls, named their effort Nehemiah Homes. “The story connected our work to something real, not something bogus,” explains Mike Gecan, the local organizer. “It got it out of the ‘housing’ field and the idea that you have to have 35 consultants to do anything. It made it more than housing.”

The heart of such narratives is a shift in collective identity from victim to agent of change. Such narratives also require skilled organizing to make them come alive — citizen politics attentive to power, diverse interests, and relationship building. Local people need to own the stories, rooted in collective life. Such stories bring together previously divided groups. They counter the idea that making money, hyper-competition, and celebrity status are the ultimate goals, with the vision of a different future animiated [sic] by democratic, egalitarian, cooperative and inclusive values.

Such stories also challenge trends in higher education. On the one hand, colleges and universities tout their role in providing expertise to those seen as in need of answers. Historian Scott Peters has called this the “heroic meta-narrative” of higher education’s role.

On the other hand, social theorists in recent decades have developed what Peters calls the “tragic counter-narrative,” in which higher education is the oppressor. As the anthropologist James Scott put it about land grant colleges, “The unspoken logic… of agricultural modernization was one of consolidating the power of central institutions and diminishing the autonomy of cultivators and their communities.”

Peters has unearthed an alternative to both, what he calls the “prophetic counter-narrative,” in which land grant college faculty and students work as part of communities. In this story, faculty and students as well as other citizens combine practical problem solving with narrative imagination.

Thus, land grant colleges once helped to organize a “Little Country Theater Movement,” local theaters across the Midwest designed to help communities tell their own stories. Alfred Arvold, on the faculty at North Dakota Agricultural College, began the movement in 1914 convinced that “there are literally millions of people in country communities today whose abilities have been hidden, simply because they have never had an opportunity to give expression to their talents.” The theater projects fed later populist movements.

Peters has been part of the Rust to Green consortium in upstate New York that revives this approach. The consortium, including Cornell, Colgate, Utica College, Hamilton College, and Mohawk Valley Community College, is working in Utica and the Mohawk Valley, with plans to expand to other cities.

Rust to Green holds that stories of community decline in the “Rust Belt,” a stretch of communities which have experienced loss of manufacturing jobs, declining populations, growing poverty and other ills, can be reversed by multidimensional work to build sustainable and resilient communities and economies. The rubric is the brainchild of Paula Horrigan, associate professor of landscape architecture at Cornell who identifies with the land grant public work tradition.

Horrigan has long been skeptical of colleges “serving communities” from on high, or simply “researching” their problems. She believes that higher education work should always be in a process of “decentering,” and measures success by the degree to which the work is able to move energy away from academic experts and towards communities. She uses the metaphor of a growing tree in which the center dies out and outer layers grow and thicken, transporting nutrients and becoming increasingly life-filled and generative. She sees herself as “part of” the region and its communities, not “partners with.”

A Brookings Institute study in 2007 identified area towns as having hidden assets and “high potential for renewed prosperity.” Building on this message, Rust to Green began in 2009 with a three year federal grant. Then mayor David Roefaro was enthusiastic. “I want to make Utica one of the greenest cities in upstate New York and our affiliation with Cornell is going to do that,” he said.

The metaphor is highly catalytic. The Mohawk Valley Food Action Network, using the Rust to Green logo, includes dozens of partners — schools, local producers, farmers’ markets, cooperative extension, local governments. It aims to strengthen local farmers and businesses, building on local knowledge and creating a healthy, sustainable food system.

One World Garden in Utica, also part of Rust to Green, is organized by a coalition including immigrants, the Mohawk Valley Center for Refugees, artists and others. It combines local food production, a park space, and art, highlighting the contributions of refugees and immigrants, seeking to counter the idea of “threat” with possibility.

Public officials have also broadened their views. “We’re now looking at municipal projects in a new way,” explains Bob Sullivan, former Urban Renewal Agency director and member of the Rust to Green Core. “We’re looking at storm water mitigation, permeable pavement and all sorts of things that could be considered green.”

Rust to Green is only two years old, but the metaphor has shown strong appeal. As one faculty member active in the consortium told Horrigan, “People don’t know much about our campus center, but everyone knows something is afoot in Rust to Green.”

Perhaps most important for democracy in New York and elsewhere is the revival of the “democracy’s college” narrative of democracy, different than either the unbridled market or government-centered action.

As Peters put it, democracy’s colleges aimed not only at “material well-being for all.” They also promoted a “democratic ideal (and practice) of self-rule, through which the common people, functioning as citizens, work as cooperative producers not only of the commonwealth, but also of the culture and politics of their own neighborhoods and communities.

This is the story of democracy as a journey, not a destination. It is needed once again.

Harry C. Boyte is National Coordinator of the American Commonwealth Partnership, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Read the full post, and other HuffPost opinion pieces by Harry Boyte, here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-boyte/college-community-partnerships_b_1917951.html

Campus Spotlight: Breaking Ground at UMBC

Breaking Ground at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC)

UMBC has been a key campus in the American Democracy Project’s Civic Agency initiative. We’re excited about the new BreakingGround initiative at UMBC which builds on UMBC’s commitment to fostering civic agency; it is yet another example of how institutional intentionality can contribute to cultural change on campus.

BreakingGround is a true campus-wide collaboration: inspired in part by student initiatives, building on a variety of successful service-learning and social change projects, supported by faculty from many disciplines, deeply rooted in UMBC’s culture and history of innovation and entrepreneurship.  BreakingGround features courses developed or redesigned to promote civic agency; incentives to link community service projects with opportunities for deep learning and engagement; numerous opportunities for students, faculty, staff, alumni and community partners to collaborate on campus and community change projects; and a blog for sharing stories, launching community discussions and promoting involvement.  Like the most successful social change movements, BreakingGround is inclusive and organic, tapping the talents and passions of the participants and helping them pull together to advance the common good.  In the wake of calls for higher education to become far more creative and effective in supporting democratic learning and engagement, BreakingGround is UMBC’s way of helping to “make the road by walking.”

About the Project

UMBC is helping to lead an extraordinary, new higher education movement toward innovative, energetic campus and community engagement. In a time of widespread skepticism about the capacity of our democracy to respond to society’s needs, UMBC’s initiatives are demonstrating the power of individuals and collaborative groups as agents of meaningful change and renewal. This work is deeply embedded in a campus culture that builds community from diversity and celebrates ingenuity and resourcefulness.

UMBC’s campus and civic engagement projects have developed over the past decade in a variety of departments, programs and student organizations linked by informal networks and conversations. Now, to deepen this work and make it more visible on campus and beyond, UMBC is fostering an intentional and powerful coalescence. This emerging collaboration, known as BreakingGround, launched in August 2012 through innovative courses, community engagement activities and online conversation.

Please visit the BreakingGround website (breakingground.umbc.edu), and follow/share the initiative on Twitter through #digUMBC.

Read ADP Campus Coordinator David Hoffman’s recent Breaking Ground blog post here.