Deliberative Citizenship Initiative

Building Democracy One Conversation at a Time

Events

Event Re-Cap: Webinar on the American Values Deliberative Forum Series

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On September 2, the DCI hosted a webinar introducing The 250th Anniversary American Values Deliberative Forum Series and how institutions and individuals can get involved. The series is designed to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and co-hosted by Davidson College, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the series will include Expert Roundtables and Community Conversations over the course of the 2025-26 academic year.

These Roundtables will include scholars with a diverse range of perspectives and academic backgrounds who will deliberate about the role of different values in American history and policy debates. The first Roundtable, for example, will be held on September 30 and will explore the tensions and complementarities between our commitments to national unity and political equality, both generally and in the specific context of immigration and citizenship.     

The week following each Roundtable, Davidson, Duke, and UNC-Chapel Hill will be hosting Community Conversations that will enable members of their communities to engage with the same questions that the experts discussed. Each institution will design their conversations so that they best match particular contexts. The conversations organized at Davidson, for example, will follow the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative’s D Team model, which are two-hour small group discussions guided by a trained facilitator, but many other models will work as well.

We welcome other institutions and organizations – as well as individual citizens – to organize similar conversations for their communities that utilize the Expert Roundtables as a catalyst for deeper engagement with the values that have animated our history and continue to permeate our political debates. Hosting such conversations is a great way to help bridge the political divides in our country, improve our ability to deliberate with one another as citizens (broadly defined), and start celebrating the upcoming 250th birthday of the United States.

To that end, in the webinar DCI Faculty Director and Associate Professor of Political Science Graham Bullock provided more information about the series itself as well as some ideas for how you might organize something for your community. The DCI has developed a series of Deliberation Guides and Pathways Guides that it will be using for the Community Conversations it will be hosting, and Dr. Bullock shared how you might adapt these guides to your purposes. He also outlined a range of different deliberative formats and designs you might use so that you can select the one that makes the most sense for your specific situation, whether it is a small group of friends gathered for dinner or a large forum with 50-100 people (or more!).  

You can check out a recording of the webinar below:

The slides from the webinar are included below as well:

American-Values-Series-Webinar-Slides

A Community Conversation on “Talking about Race”

On September 8, 2025, the Davidson College Deliberative Citizenship Initiative (DCI) and the Theatre Department co-sponsored a  Community Conversation on “Talking about Race: What Makes It Possible and Productive?” in the Barber Theatre’s lobby. The conversation was held a week after the production of Dissonance on Monday, September 1 in the Barber Theatre by actor-playwrights Marci J. Duncan and Kerry Sandell. The play, which is directed by Davidson College Assistant Professor of Theatre James Webb, 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.

Some of the participants in the Community Conversation had seen the play while others had not, but everyone there was committed to exploring the question of what makes conversations about race possible and productive. The conversation was designed by DCI Senior Fellow Alyssa Henke ’26 as part of her DCI fellows deliberation project, and one of Alyssa’s goals was to generate insights and suggestions for future efforts to host conversations about race, whether at Davidson College or elsewhere.

conversations around round tables

Approximately 20 Davidson students and faculty attended the event and participated in small group discussions facilitated by several DCI Fellows. Since the event, Alyssa has compiled the notes taken by the DCI Fellows from their group’s discussions in the document below. She also developed a two-page infographic (also available below) that summarizes some of the main tips that came up in these conversations, from how to prepare for these conversations to what to pay attention to during them. The infographic also provides suggestions for conversations with both close friends and new connections.

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. The hope is that these tips will be helpful as we have opportunities to have conversations about race, whether they are in the context of personal relationships, local histories, or national issues.

One such opportunity is Davidson College’s upcoming dedication of its “With these Hands” memorial to the enslaved and exploited on Thursday, October 22, 2025. The memorial is designed to recognize the contributions of African Americans to the College since its founding in 1837 either as enslaved people before the Civil War or exploited people during the Jim Crow era afterwards. It will likely provoke questions and conversations about Davidson’s history, legacy, and future with regard to race; the tips below can enable those conversations to deepen our understanding of different perspectives on these questions and strengthen our relationships and sense of connection in the process.

Report Released from the DCI’s Campus Conversation on the Honor Code

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Image that has a green DCI logo and the words, Campus Conversation Report: Resources for Continued Engagement on The Honor Code.

On March 27th, 2025, the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative hosted a Campus Conversation where over 50 faculty, staff, and students discussed the culture of academic integrity and the honor code at Davidson. The forum’s purpose was for the Davidson community to have a meaningful discussion about the role of academic integrity on campus. To begin the forum, the Honor Council provided an update and presentation on Davidson’s honor code. After the presentation, the participants broke into roundtable discussions where they deliberated about what academic integrity is, what a culture that embodies academic integrity looks like, and possible actions to take to improve this culture at Davidson. You can check out a summary of the event on the DCI’s website here; it includes the deliberation guide used during the discussions and some great photos of the event.

Photo from Honor Code Forum

The organizers of the event – LJ Phillips ’25, Isabella Neri ’27, Cavan Klein ’27, and DCI Faculty Director Graham Bullock – have collated, analyzed, and discussed the input that participants provided via the survey we distributed after the event. They endeavored to capture the participants’ thoughts and suggestions in the document below, “Campus Conversation Report: Resources for Continued Engagement on the Honor Code.”

Like the DCI’s pathways guides that the DCI distributes after each of its deliberative forums, the report includes ideas for moving forward on the topic of the event. Options for learning more and getting more connected and involved with regard to the honor code are included for your consideration.

This document has been shared with the Honor Council, Student Government Association, the Dean of the Faculty’s Office, the President’s Office, and the Dean of Student’s Office as they consider different ways to build a more robust culture of academic integrity at Davidson. It has also been shared with attendees of the honor code forum. Our hope is that it stimulates further discussions and well-considered actions that address the concerns and questions that have been raised about academic integrity within the Davidson community.

Check out the report below!

Campus-Conversation-Report_The-Honor-Code

DCI x WALT Collaboration!

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image of two students hosting a radio show

Earlier this spring, a representative from Davidson’s student radio station, WALT, reached out to the DCI about hosting an hour-long show on the station. It could highlight the work of the DCI, discuss the challenges and opportunities of deliberation — whatever we thought might be interesting to WALT audiences. If it went well and people were interested, it could serve as a pilot for a regular show in the coming academic year. Several DCI Fellows were interested in trying it out, and so they quickly pulled together a plan at the end of the semester — actually, for a show that was broadcast on the last day of the semester, and it went really well. Especially for the first time the DCI hit the radiowaves!

DCI Fellows Grace Zagoria ’27 and Zak Abdulahi ’27 served as hosts of the show. They talked about their own experiences facilitating conversations as part of the DCI’s Forums and D Teams, and they interviewed several other fellows about their experiences. Fatima Mukasa ’28 talked about how much she enjoyed serving as a fellow as a first-year student and as an international student from Uganda. And Valeriia Kruzhkova ’26, a junior from Ukraine, also talked about her experience as both a fellow and senior fellow with the DCI.

The hosts also interspersed some of their favorite music throughout the show, along with some fun banter among themselves along the way. Check out the full episode below, and let us know if you think we should do a regular show at dci@davidson.edu:

Event Recap: DCI @ VMC!

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Photo from Verna Miller Case symposium.

On May 8, several DCI Fellows represented the DCI at the Verna Miller Case Research and Creative Works Symposium on the Davidson campus. Since 2017 students have been presenting their research and creative works at this annual symposium, and the DCI has participated for the past five years. This year, students presented two posters at the community-based learning poster fair component of the symposium. The first poster highlighted the work of the DCI over the 2024-25 academic year, including its Deliberative Forums, D Teams, Fellows Program, and more. DCI Fellows Alyssa Henke ’26, Isabella Neri ’27, Zak Abdulahi ’27, and Fatima Mukasa ’28 did a great job introducing the poster and the DCI to a wide range of students, faculty, and staff.

Photo from Verna Miller Case symposium.

Meanwhile, Luna Noguchi ’24 and Keya Zhou ’24 introduced a second poster designed to explain the purpose, process, and outputs of the Ginkgo Tree Project that they and several other students were involved in this past year. This project aimed was launched at the request of Dean of the Faculty Shelley Rigger to utilize a deliberative process to develop text introducing the Ginkgo trees that had planted on the Davidson campus between Chambers, Wall, and the library. The saplings are descendants of trees that had survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and were originally envisioned to be symbols of peace and warnings about war. Some students and alumni, however, felt that they did not adequately represent the full scale of the suffering of WWII in the Asia Pacific region, especially at the hands of the Japanese military in countries across East Asia and Southeast Asia. The DCI team hosted a deliberative forum to inform the campus community about the impact of war in the Asia Pacific and invite ideas for how signs and materials about the trees could indeed capture the range of feelings and interpretations about that period in history. You can read more about the project here, and we will be posting updates about it soon.

The DCI team had invited community input on the materials it had developed based on ideas generated during the forum it hosted, and poster at the Verna Miller Case symposium was another way they recruited additional feedback. The draft text for the signs and an accompanying website was included on the poster, and symposium attendees could read the text and submit their thoughts via a posted QR code. They could also talk with Keya and Luna about their impressions as well.

Overall, the symposium was a wonderful way for the DCI to share some of its work with the campus community. Check out more of the photos from the event below…