Announcements

This Friday, September 1^st, as part of Davidson’s back-to-school Welcome Week, the DCI is hosting a Semester Kickoff Party in the 900 Room at the Alvarez Student Union from 11 AM to 1 PM. We welcome all Davidson students, faculty and staff to join us for pizza, deliberation about some hot topics, and even a few prizes. You don’t need to RSVP—bring your friends and drop in any time!

Our Kickoff Party is a place to learn how you can get involved in deliberation about contentious topics of public interest on campus and beyond, and to meet others interested in deliberation on campus. You will also get a chance to meet current DCI Fellows, Senior Fellows, and some members of the DCI leadership team along the way. You’ll also be able to talk with us about our upcoming programs  and to find your own way to get involved—whether that means joining a D Team, attending a Deliberative Forum, and/or attending our Deliberative Citizenship Speaker Series.

This fall, our programming is focused on three main themes. We will host a Deliberative Forum in partnership with Davidson’s Political Science Department which will focus on what kind of role, if any, democratic nations ought to take in promoting and defending democracy across the globe (we’ll be sharing more info soon about this event). We have also organized this semester’s deliberative D Teams around three topics—abortion, book censorship, and the relationship between speech and harm—all of which are connected in some ways to autonomy and its relationship to other rights and values. (Sign up for D Teams by Sept. 7^th here!) And we’ll have a speaker come to Davidson to discuss how we can bridge divides across political, racial, and religious differences – stay tuned for registration info coming soon!

Of course, we’ll also be hosting our annual Deliberation Facilitator Training Program again at the beginning of this term, too. Learn more about it here, and sign up by Sept. 5^th.

We think these topics are all ripe for public deliberation right now, and we hope that you will join us on Friday to learn more and to practice some deliberation with us as we get energized for the coming year. Follow us on your favorite social media site to learn more about our upcoming events!

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How should we engage in meaningful, productive disagreement, discussion, and problem-solving with others, especially when the issue at hand is highly contentious and politicized? This is the fundamental question the DCI has been working to answer, and we believe there is a way to do it well. We can disagree respectfully, we can discover the truth in spite of—and indeed, because of—our differences, and we can solve pressing issues democratically using the tools of deliberative democracy.

Deliberation, as we see it at the DCI, is a method of discussion that enables citizens—broadly construed so as not to limit this notion to persons with one particular legal status—to state their views and the presuppositions behind them, reconstruct the arguments for their positions, and to make progress toward solutions to problems where there is entrenched disagreement.

Although this can sometimes happen organically in conversation or in the political sphere, the DCI came about in part because this is so difficult to achieve. After all, we cannot claim to be immune from falling into echo chambers, falling prey to motivated reasoning, relying on fallacious reasoning, or even from failing to be able to articulate the main reasons for the views we hold in the face of criticism from another.

On the other hand, we can also be so uncomfortable in the face of disagreement that we would rather not engage—and we either decide to simply agree to disagree or to shut each other out. But living together requires making decisions together and coming to a shared understanding of difficult problems, at least to some extent.

Our experience, and the experienc of similar programs around the world, has found that well-trained and intentional facilitators can help participants overcome these obstacles and engage in meaningful and productive deliberation, even when they disagree deeply. This is why the DCI is hosting its fifth Deliberation Facilitator Training Program this year. The training will take place over two sessions from 1:30 pm to 5:30 pm, one on Sunday, Sept. 10^th and the other on Saturday, Sept. 16^th. The sessions complement each other are required components of the training. Virtual and in-person options are available, but space is limited so sign up soon if you are interested. 

his hands-on and interactive program enables participants to lead deliberation sessions in their community, with colleagues, with their families, or in their classrooms, and to facilitate DCI-hosted forums on matters of public interest. The DCI supports facilitators with learning materials we send out before the training days, and participants get a chance to practice facilitating a mock deliberation.

Do you feel your community, your family, your students, or your colleagues would benefit from deliberating about an issue with the help of a trained facilitator? Learn more and sign up here by Tuesday, Sept. 5^th!

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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.