Deliberative Citizenship Initiative

Building Democracy One Conversation at a Time

DCI Posts

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

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Good Work: examining institutions cover image.

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. 

The DCI Has a New Assistant Director!  

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The DCI welcomes Sara Copic as our new Assistant Director! Dr. Copic will be responsible for assisting with the development, implementation, and assessment of the DCI’s programs and operations. Dr. Copic’s experience at both the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Notre Dame prepares her exceedingly well to help lead the DCI’s efforts to create opportunities for productive dialogue and deliberation in diverse classroom settings, outside of the classroom, and in the community.

Dr. Copic received her PhD in philosophy from UNC-Chapel Hill, where she recently served as Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor of Philosophy and taught courses in practical ethics, bioethics, the ethics of peace, war, and defense, language and communication, and more. In her research, Dr. Copic specializes in the philosophy of language. She writes about the relationship our ordinary discourse has to truth and social cooperation, and how these goals determine different types of linguistic meaning. Her teaching and research thus directly relate to some of the themes that the DCI engages with on a regular basis.

Dr. Copic has also worked as Design Project Manager in the Office of Digital Learning at the University of Notre Dame, where she led over 12 different digital education projects to successful completion, including the University’s digital resiliency initiative during the Covid-19 pandemic and projects on tech and innovation ethics, poverty, and interfaith dialogue. Dr. Copic’s experience leading complex education projects will be another asset to the DCI, where she will help design and implement programs in all of its focus areas.

In this work, Dr. Copic will apply lessons she has learned as a scholar-teacher who focuses on utilizing active learning strategies that foster an inclusive classroom environment and bridge achievement gaps between students from different backgrounds. In her teaching, she has also focused on helping students practice reflection and critical thinking not only on their own but also in community with one another.

In addition to her duties as the DCI’s Assistant Director, Sara looks forward to teaching a course at Davidson on the nature and significance of artificial intelligence in the College Writing Program in Spring 2024. Dr. Copic is an affiliate of the AI Project at UNC Chapel Hill and also writes about what lessons we can learn about meanings by studying large language models. AI is a hot topic ripe for deliberation, and Dr. Copic’s course will enable students to grapple with both its challenges and opportunities and connect with any programming the DCI organizes around this important issue. 

All to say, we are excited that Dr. Copic has joined the DCI’s leadership team! Watch out for blog posts and emails from Dr. Copic, and say hi to her if you see her on campus or in the community.

2023-24 D Team and Forum Topics Survey Now Open!

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Voting box with sign "Vote Here" displayed on the front.

We are working on identifying and prioritizing topics for the DCI’s 2023-24 Deliberative Forums and D Teams, and would love your feedback on the ideas we are considering in the brief survey below. Thank you to those of you who have submitted ideas – we received a lot of great suggestions and have tried to incorporate them into the options listed. If you’d like to provide your input on the options we are considering, please complete the survey below by June 30. Thanks!

DCI 2023-24 Topics Survey

DCI Featured in The Davidsonian

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By Carla Cole, DCI Coordinator

The DCI was recently featured in an article in The Davidsonian entitled “DCI Creates New Forum for Student-Faculty Engagement.” In the article, Kevin Garcia-Galindo ’24, a 2022-23 DCI Fellow, and Dr. Graham Bullock, the DCI’s Faculty Director, explain the purpose of the DCI and ways in which DCI programming helps students to engage in discourse across difference in productive, meaningful ways.

The DCI seeks to reinforce humane instincts in an effort to bridge polarization and foster empathy as we interact with others with whom we deeply disagree. Dr. Bullock explains the need for deliberative spaces and processes as a means of approaching difficult problems and promoting healthy democracy, and how deliberation can catalyze “creative solutions that may transcend where we started.”

The article highlights DCI programming, including the Fellows Program, Deliberative Forums, D Teams, and Commons Conversations. The Fellows Program is the core of the DCI, as Fellows serve as student leaders who immerse themselves in deliberative theory and practice. They facilitate deliberative forums, D Teams, and the newly launched Commons Conversations, which provides a space for students to deliberate about issues important to them in a productive way.  As Garcia-Galindo states, getting DCI participants to talk to each other “deeply about their beliefs and values during conversations that feel like they really matter has been such an inspiring opportunity for me, one that I hope to continue in the future.”

You can read the full article here.

DCI Fellow Shares Impact of Deliberation

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Photo of Cadie McNaboe

By Carla Cole, DCI Coordinator

Cadie McNaboe, 2020-2021 Deliberative Citizenship Initiative Fellow and Co-Convener and Davison ‘22 political science major, shares the impact deliberation has had on her life in the Davidson Journal Magazine article, “Moving From the Loudest Voice to Listener, From Debate to Deliberation.” Cadie discusses how her training and experiences as a Fellow with the DCI helped her in her classes and personal relationships. Cadie notes the importance of active listening and how her use of conversation maps helped her to become more engaged in her classes and other conversations.

Regarding her experience facilitating DCI discussions for forums and D Teams, Cadie states, “As a facilitator in the deliberations, my role wasn’t to amplify my own thoughts. Instead my goal was to create space for all participants to share, and then guide them in seeing how their different perspectives overlapped. Going from a mindset that highlights the importance of your opinion to a model where all voices are meant to be equal, was a fundamental shift.”

Cadie embraced this shift and implemented it into various aspects of her life, including family dinners where potentially divisive conversations took place. Cadie was able to facilitate a family conversation about contentious political issues and find areas of common ground rather than chaos. Cadie says she isn’t sure whether deliberation can transform our democracy, but says, “what I do know for certain is that deliberation has fundamentally transformed me.” You can read the full article here.