Deliberative Citizenship Initiative

Building Democracy One Conversation at a Time

Sara Copic

Introducing Our Fall 2023 D Teams

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The DCI is hosting its fourth year of D Teams starting this fall, and we are excited to share this fall’s theme and topics with you. This year, we also invite you to participate in our new Invite a Friend Program, which will help us increase the range of perspectives represented in D Team discussions.

The DCI’s D Teams provide the opportunity for groups of 6-10 people to meet three times per semester and to discuss a series of contentious topics of public concern together. D Teams present a unique opportunity because they can get you into meaningful conversation with people socially, generationally, or ideologically different from you. They build community among participants empower them to have more productive conversations about topics that typically are difficult to talk about.

When we conducted our Topics Survey earlier this summer—where we gathered responses from previous D Team participants, Davidson students, and community members via our social media channels—and when we considered the suggestions for topics from our 2022-2023 cohort of DCI Fellows, we found that there was significant interest in topics that seemed to touch on the value of autonomy. These topics were: (i) speech, harm, and offense, (ii) abortion, and (iii) book censorship.

Our goal this year is to pay attention to the different problems presented by each topic while also investigating different ways of balancing our autonomy rights with one another’s so that everyone’s autonomy can be properly respected. We will also explore how our commitment to autonomy should be weighed when it comes into conflict with other values. To learn more about our topics for this year and our theme, see our Fall 2023 D Teams webpage. You can also read more about the purpose and structure of our D Teams here.

Since D Teams are about building community and building democracy, we very much would like you to participate in our Invite a Friend Program. This program allows you to indicate a preference to be on a D Team with someone you know when you register. They could be a friend, family member, colleague, neighbor, or someone you know from another context. You may want to invite someone who is ideologically different from you, in order to increase our D Teams’ ability to engage with different perspectives. Or, in case you are feeling hesitant about joining a team, you may want to invite someone with whom you share something in common. In either case, we welcome you and a friend (or multiple friends!) to join us this year as we deliberate about the problems we find both pressing and challenging for us to solve today.

Sign up for a D Team – and invite a friend – by September 7, 2023.

DCI in the News: Notre Dame’s Good Work Series

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By Sara Copic, DCI Assistant Director

Virtues and Vocations: Higher Education for Human Flourishing is a magazine of the Virtues and Vocations initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns. This year, the DCI was featured as part of the magazine’s Good Work series. To read the original article, click here: https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/newsletter-post/davidson-college-deliberative-citizenship-initiative/ 

The article does a nice job of summarizing the work of the DCI and its core mission programs. 

The DCI was founded in 2020 with the goal of combating unproductive, polarized political and social discourse by replacing it with deliberative citizenship. Dr. Graham Bullock, Associate Professor of Political Science and Faculty Director of the DCI at Davidson College, was one of the founding co-conveners of the DCI. In the Virtues and Vocations article, Dr. Bullock elaborates on the notion of citizenship that is at the heart of the DCI:

“Citizenship has become equated with what passport you hold, a kind of national identity, but this is not the only way to think about citizenship. We’ve tried to think about a broader sense of citizenship as the work that we do together to engage the problems we face in society.”

And he elaborates on what deliberation is:

“Deliberation is sort of an antidote to the very harsh, toxic public discourse that we experience in the mainstream and social media contexts – talking past each other, not really engaging with one another’s reasons, sometimes not even providing reasons for why we hold the positions we do. We see deliberation as a form of discourse that is in good faith, trying to understand one another and then come up with new ideas that might often transcend where we started from.”

The article goes on to explain the history of the DCI and its early events, which started at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than allowing COVID to block their progress, its leadership saw the pandemic as an opportunity to host virtual events that could draw not only a local and regional but also a national audience to the DCI. As a result, we have been able to host many kinds of deliberative discussions, both online and in-person. 

The DCI’s programming includes small-scale discussions between members of deliberative groups, or D Teams, and larger scale events like our speaker series and public forums. All of our deliberations are facilitated by the DCI Fellows, who are Davidson students trained in best practices for leading productive and meaningful deliberations between people from all walks of life and from many ideological backgrounds. 

As we look ahead to the coming academic year, we hope to see you at our speaker series and public forums, to meet you in one of our D Teams or during one of our deliberation facilitator training workshops. Become a member below to keep up with our activity, and follow us on your favorite social media site.