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.
