Announcements

If you are ready to sign-up for a Spring 2026 D Team Community Conversation, click here and it will take you to the registration form. If you’d like to learn more, read on below…

You might have heard that this year — 2026 — is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. You might also be concerned about the state of our country — 3 out of 4 Americans are dissatisfied with its direction.

Perhaps you are looking for a way to both express and explore those concerns while also reflecting on the trajectory of American history in this anniversary year. How can we both celebrate the progress we have made (and the world has made) while also examining the progress we still have yet to achieve?

If so, you might be interested in participating in the Deliberative Forum Series on American Values being hosted by Davidson College, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The series aims to engage diverse public audiences with a nuanced and complex understanding of our nation’s history and the underlying principles, traditions, and stories on which our country was founded.

The series is organized around a series of four forums over the course of the 2025-2026 academic year. Each forum will consist of an Expert Roundtable that will explore two particular values and connect them to current events and issues facing the American public. The roundtables will be followed by Community Conversations by higher education institutions and other organizations across North Carolina and beyond.

The D Team Community Conversations hosted by Davidson College will follow a format similar to the D Teams it has been organizing for the past five years. They will be held in the week or two after each forum, and students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members can sign up for meetings that will be held during the day or in the evening on both weekdays and weekends. You can sign-up for these conversations here; the registration deadline to register is January 30.

For those unable to join a D Team Community Conversations, we will also be hosting a single Community Conversation on the same topic as the first Expert Roundtable on February 25 at 7 pm in the 900 Room. This will be an opportunity for students, faculty, staff, and community members to discuss the issues covered by the roundtable’s panelists, guided by DCI facilitators. You can register to attend this conversation here.

The first American Values Deliberative Forum was hosted at Davidson College in the fall and focused on Balancing Equality and Unity: The Case of Immigration and Citizenship, while the second American Values Deliberative Forum, hosted at UNC Chapel Hill also in the fall, explored the topic of Balancing Self-Government and National Stability: The Case of Presidents, Institutions, and the People.”

Our third American Values Deliberative Forum topic is Balancing Liberty and General Welfare: The Case of Social Safety Nets. The associated Expert Roundtable will be held on February 11th at Davidson College. You can learn more about this Roundtable and the participating panelists here. The fourth American Values Deliberative Forum topic will focus on Justice and the Rule of Law: The Case of Constitutional Rights. This forum will be held on March 24 at Duke University, broadcasted online, and streamed live at a watch party at the Davidson College. More information about it will be coming soon.

This innovative two-stage process is designed to connect expert knowledge with diverse public audiences. Scholars with diverse backgrounds and divergent interpretations of the topics at hand will be invited to the Expert Roundtables to ensure a wide range of perspectives is represented.  They will share and discuss their perspectives on the values in question (e.g., unity and equality) and how they relate to the contemporary issue in focus (e.g. immigration and citizenship).

Then the Community Conversations will provide the public with the opportunity to share their own views on these topics, building on, contesting, or transcending the experts’ perspectives. A Deliberation Guide will be provided in advance of the forum to provide everyone with some baseline information about the topics and different perspectives on them. This process hopefully will help us break out of tendencies towards our selective amnesia so that we engage with the full range of American voices and how we each, individually and collectively, understand what our values are and how they are relevant to our current challenges as a nation.

To learn how your organization might host its own Community Conversation following one or more of the Expert Roundtables, you are welcome to watch this webinar that will introduce the forum series and map out a range of different ways to get involved.

To learn more about the D Team experience more generally, check out this page.

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The Deliberative Citizenship Initiative invites you to join us for a watch party with Davidson students, faculty, staff, and community members in Hance Auditorium to view the second Expert Roundtable on “Balancing Self-Government and National Stability: The Case of Presidents, Institutions, and the People” that will be hosted at UNC Chapel Hill from 5:30 pm to 7 pm on October 30. Refreshments will be served. Registration is not required, but please help us out with our planning by clicking on this link. If you can’t join us in person, you can also view the Expert Roundtable online yourself by registering for the event via UNC Chapel Hill’s registration page. 

The panelists on this roundtable include Thomas Frank (best-selling author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?), John Gastil (professor of communication studies, public policy, and political science at Penn State), and Jennifer Mascott (professor of law and founder of the Separation of Powers Institute at Catholic University). See below for more info about each panelist and the moderator (Kevin McGuire, UNC Chapel Hill professor of political science):

Thomas Frank is a historian and political analyst known for his critically acclaimed books, such as What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004) and, most recently, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism (2020). Dr. Frank, who earned a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, is best known for his New York Times best-selling book, What’s the Matter with Kansas, while his more recent book on anti-populism explores the populism movements from the 1890s to the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement to the present – and the resistance to them.

John Gastil is Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies, Public Policy, and Political Science at Penn State, where he also serves as Senior Scholar at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and teaches courses on political communication, group behavior, and democratic deliberation. Dr. Gastil studies political deliberation and deliberative governance, and he has authored several books, including, most recently, Hope for Democracy: How Citizens Can Bring Reason Back into Politics (2019), which examines how the State of Oregon’s Citizens’ Initiative Review enables citizens and public officials to work together to bring more rationality and empathy into modern politics.

Jennifer Mascott is Associate Professor of Law (currently on public service leave) and the Founder of the Separation of Powers Institute at Catholic Law. Professor Mascott’s writing focuses on administrative and constitutional law, constitutional and statutory interpretation, and separation of powers in the U.S. context. Professor Mascott clerked for Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, served in the US Department of Justice in 2019 and 2020 and in the White House General Counsel’s Office in 2025. She was recently confirmed to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the 3^rd Circuit.

Kevin McGuire  is Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and will serve as the moderator of the roundtable. Dr. McGuire teaches courses on the U.S. Supreme Court and American constitutional law. His current research interests include the effect of the Court’s institutional arrangements on the Court’s policymaking, the impact of public opinion on the Court, and the measurement and modeling of judicial outcomes. He is the author of Understanding the U.S. Supreme Court and The Supreme Court Bar: Legal Elites in the Washington Community , and co-editor of the forthcoming Creating Constitutional Change: Clashes over Power and Liberty in the Supreme Court .

250^th Anniversary American Values Deliberative Forum Series

This event is the second Expert Roundtable in the 250^th Anniversary American Values Deliberative Forum Series, which is designed to commemorate the upcoming 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This anniversary represents an important opportunity to both deepen and elevate the discourse about the values that have animated American social and political debates throughout its history. The goal of the series is to enable Americans of all backgrounds – college students, high school students, families and neighbors, members of faith communities and other civic organizations – to authentically, respectfully, and constructively engage with each other about our foundational ideals and how they are relevant to contemporary policy issues.

Co-hosted by Davidson College’s Deliberative Citizenship Initiative (DCI), Duke University’s Provost’s Initiative on Pluralism, Free Inquiry, and Belonging, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Program for Public Discourse, this year-long program will include both Expert Roundtables and Community Conversations dedicated to unpacking, understanding, and applying the values that are foundational to the United States – and to many other countries around the world.

Watch Parties and Community Conversations

This year, we’re proud to partner with two other North Carolina institutions of higher education, Duke and UNC Chapel Hill, to expand the reach of the series. Davidson will host two of the Expert Roundtables, while Duke and UNC will each host one roundtable on their respective campuses. All four will be available to watch online, with potential for “watch parties” to be held at higher education institutions and other organizations across North Carolina and beyond, including Davidson, Duke, and UNC-Chapel Hill.

Organizations can also host Community Conversations in the week after the Expert Roundtable. For ideas on how to host either a watch party of community conversation, check out the webinar that DCI Faculty Director Graham Bullock hosted that provides an overview of different strategies and options you might work well in different organizational and community contexts. Please email dci@davidson.edu if you have any questions or ideas you’d like to share.

Below are some guides that you can use to host such conversations. The Deliberation Guide provides both important background information on the topics in question and a specific framework for engaging with these topics in the context of a two-hour facilitated conversation, which is the format that the DCI’s D Teams will use to explore the topic. The Issue Guide is similar to the Deliberation Guide but does not include the structured format for group conversations. The Issue Brief provides a brief outline of the main ideas that are presented in the Deliberation Guide and Issue Guide. While both include a similar list of questions to consider about the topic, they are designed for personal reflection before, during, or after our expert roundtable on the same topic.

ISSUE BRIEF

ISSUE GUIDE

DELIBERATION GUIDE

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Following the riveting production of Dissonance on Monday, September 1 in the Barber Theatre by actor-playwrights Marci J. Duncan and Kerry Sandell, Davidson College’s Theatre Department and Deliberative Citizenship Initiative (DCI) are co-hosting a Community Conversation on “Talking about Race: What Makes It Possible and Productive?” on September 8 at 7 pm in the Barber Theatre’s lobby.

The play, which explores what happens when a Black woman and a White woman who have been friends for 20 years have their first open, honest conversation about race, provides a helpful backdrop for this conversation. You do not have to have seen the play, however, to participate in the conversation; we welcome all members of the Davidson community — students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members — who are able to join us for this in-person event.

This Community Conversation has been designed by DCI Senior Fellow Alyssa Henke ’26 as part of her DCI fellows deliberation project. If you register at the link below, we will send you a deliberation guide for the conversation that will outline the questions we’ll discuss during our hour together. Our hope is that this discussion will help us generate some insights and suggestions for future efforts to host conversations about race, whether at Davidson College or elsewhere.

Race is one of the most challenging topics to discuss with family, friends, colleagues, and our fellow citizens. And yet it is also one of the most important topics to engage with, given our many divides that relate to the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and efforts to advance racial equity and justice. We therefore hope you will join us for this important opportunity to discuss how best to have these conversations — Monday, Sept. 8 from 7 pm to 8 pm, in the Barber Theatre Lobby. We’ll have cookies, brownies, and some good conversation. Click the link below to register for the event.

Race is one of the most challenging topics to discuss with family, friends, colleagues, and our fellow citizens. And yet it is also one of the most important topics to engage with, given our many divides that relate to the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and efforts to advance racial equity and justice. For this reason, the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative has incorporated conversations about race into our programming since its inception back in the fall of 2020, when one of our D Team conversations focused on the local legacies of slavery in Davidson and the north Mecklenburg region.

This engagement continues in a collaboration with Davidson College’s Theatre Department, which is presenting the touring production of Dissonance on Monday, September 1 at 7:00 p.m. in the Barber Theatre. Written and performed by Marci J. Duncan and Kerry Sandell, this compelling play explores what happens when a Black woman and a White woman—who have been friends for 20 years—have their first open, honest conversation about race. Dickson Foundation Assistant Professor of Theatre James Webb served as both dramaturg and director of the show, which has been called “an emotional powerhouse of a production” (Anne Valentino, Washington DC Theatre Review).

The performance will be followed by a brief talkback with the playwrights/actresses and the director, moderated by DCI Faculty Director Graham Bullock and DCI Fellow Alyssa Henke ’26. They will also be introducing a Community Conversation that the DCI and Theatre Department are co-hosting a week after the performance on Sept. 8 at 7 pm that will enable Davidson students, staff, faculty, and community members to discuss what makes talking about race possible and productive. We’ll share more info about this conversation next week after the production.

Admission is free to the play for everyone, but reservations are required. Please click here to secure your seats. We warmly encourage you to join us for what will be an engaging and thought-provoking evening.