Deliberative Citizenship Initiative

Building Democracy One Conversation at a Time

Fellows

DCI’s Fall 2023 Deliberative Forum Recap & Recording: The Challenge for Democracy

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On Thursday, October 19, the DCI hosted its 9th public Deliberative Forum, The Challenge for Democracy: To What Extent Should the U.S. and Other Democratic Nations Defend and Promote Democracy Around the World?  For this event, we partnered with Davidson’s own Political Science Department and featured speakers with different global areas of specialization. Professors Bes Ceka, Shelley Rigger, and Ken Menkhaus presented their own views about democracy promotion and defense and focused on Europe, Asia, and Africa (respectively). We invite you to watch the recording of our panel below!

The Challenge for Democracy: To What Extent Should the U.S. and Other Democratic Nations Defend and Promote Democracy

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Our Deliberative Forum didn’t end with the panel. After the panel discussion, 96 participants engaged with one another in small-group deliberations facilitated by the DCI’s Fellows, Senior Fellows, and others who have gone through our Deliberation Facilitator Training Program, including a few Davidson faculty members. We had a total of 18 small groups deliberating about the topic both online and in-person, drawing on our Deliberation Guide written for the event and engaging with one another on the forum’s central question.

Check out some photos and the short video of these discussions below.

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The Explorer Mindset: Can It Be a Possibility?

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Divin Dushimimana ‘26 (DCI Fellow)

We’re in a world with many polarizing ideas. At some point it feels like it’s one idea against all other ideas and their owners do everything in their capacity to transmit their ideas. Without going too far from where our present location, let’s start with the US and the country’s political systems. We mostly have Republicans vs Democrats. These political ideologies differ in many ways, starting with their perspective on taxes to minimum wage to healthcare policy to the military and to many other things in the country. Statistics show that the number of Americans in each party with a negative view of the other party has doubled since 19941https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/. It’s as if members of one political party wants to convert people in the other party to their beliefs.

By zooming out, we can see that the western political and economic ideology of democracy and capitalism has been fighting head-to-head with the political and economic ideologies of socialism and communism for a long time. Having been present in a conversation between an American and a Chinese that encapsulated this conflict, it’s hard for me to envision a situation where an explorer-mindset as a deliberative disposition can be applicable in a normal conversation. In this conversation about capitalism and communism that I witnessed, it was about one person proving why one of the systems is better than the other.  Now that I think about it, neither were looking for a common ground in the debate, and I feel like this is how many conversations are in this world.

When looking back to my primary school memories, I reminisce about debates we used to have like fire vs water, food vs water, or even who is better between mother and father. As I remember, none of us in these conversations were ready to apply the explorer-mindset to understand where other people’s opinions originate. As we grow up, this character trait – a stubborn commitment to our currently held beliefs, right or wrong – gets ingrained in us and we become resistant to accepting and learning from other people’s perspectives. When I look back, I think polarization is a concept that we were taught since we were young and we grow up to apply it in our daily lives.

That’s why the explorer mindset is a concept I had never seen applied by anyone before reading and learning about the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative. My conversations were so debate-focused before joining DCI. Ever since I learned about this concept, I’ve been trying to put it into practice because I realized it’s a way to practice intellectual humility by understanding that there could be multiple truths to a certain topic. Conversations should shift from being focused on persuading another person of your perspective or opinion to finding common ground and actually learning why people think the way they think. This is because people’s backgrounds and experiences do really influence their opinions on certain topics.

However, with little exposure to this concept, it’s unlikely that people are going to put it into practice or that the number of people willing to practice intellectual humility will increase. Instead, we see the number of people without intellectual humility increase day by the day and this is a concerning trend. Unless DCI and other similar initiatives become accessible to more students, people, and institutions around the world, the explorer-mindset is unlikely to spread widely, despite our desperate need for it amidst today’s hyper-polarization. For this reason, I hope that more of us will join the DCI and participate in its activities, so we can all explore different perspectives together, in our search of solutions to our common problems.  

Emotional Readiness vs. Community Relevance? The Difficulty of Selecting Topics for Deliberation

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two heads

By Laegan Smith ’24 (DCI Fellow)

When I completed the training to become a facilitator for deliberation, one of the first things we discussed was how to select topics for deliberation. That seemed easy enough to me at first—surely you can just choose any topic and talk about it—but I soon found that there are a lot of questions that must first be asked to determine if a topic will make for a productive conversation.

For example, what issues are people interested in talking about? Will participants have enough background knowledge to deliberate about the issue? Is it possible to gather people with diverse viewpoints and opinions to deliberate? Can participants have disagreements about the issue? Are participants emotionally ready to deliberate about the issue? All these questions are used to determine whether a topic can be considered timely and “ripe” for discussion for a group.

These questions have come up again and again as the DCI has organized and hosted deliberations throughout this year. During our initial training, we were tasked with coming up with some possible deliberation topics for Davidson College and my fellow trainees and I disagreed on whether some topics could be considered “ripe” for discussion or not. I felt like the topic one of my peers suggested was too sensitive and emotionally charged to deliberate given the recent events surrounding it in the news, while my peer argued that that was the exact reason it would be a good topic for deliberation. While I was more focused on the question of emotional readiness, he was focused on the question of community interest. I realized then how subjective choosing a “ripe” topic is.

These questions came up for me again at the deliberative forum on Schools and Parents: Who Should Teach our Kids about Race, Gender, and Sexuality? that the DCI hosted last semester. After the event, I spoke to some of my peers who disagreed that the event should have been held to gauge why they didn’t want to participate. The overwhelming answer that I received was, “I refuse to deliberate about something so personal to me.” That resonated with me: though I did not feel the same way about that particular event, I felt that that was absolutely a valid reason not to partake in a deliberation. The other feedback I received was that the deliberation shouldn’t have even been held—that it was too personal and sensitive of a topic to deliberate at all.

The next week, another one of the DCI Fellows and I shared our thoughts on this issue during our weekly Commons Conversations. We and some other students discussed not only what topics we felt were timely for deliberation, but also what topics we felt should and shouldn’t be deliberated given the feedback from the forum. It was difficult to draw the line between uncomfortable topics that might hit too close to home for some people and topics that are inherently unsuitable for deliberation due to their sensitivity.

My initial reaction was that there definitely are topics that are too sensitive to be deliberated. However, the conversation raised some important questions: if topics that are too sensitive aren’t deliberated, how will we ever understand other perspectives on those topics? How will we be able to explain our point of view to someone who disagrees? How can we as a society move forward on the most personal of topics if we do not discuss them?

I don’t know the answers to these questions and I’m still not sure where the line should be drawn—it’s incredibly subjective. I’ve learned from these experiences how difficult it is to select a topic for deliberation and how impossible it is to please everyone when doing so. Ultimately, I think it’s up to the organizer of a deliberation to gauge the emotional readiness of the community it serves and up to the participant to decide whether they personally are emotionally ready to attend, and it’s okay if the answer is no.

The Benefits of Deliberation in Sports and Daily Life

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Davidson team

By Peyton Carter ’23 (DCI Fellow)

This semester for the DCI, a lot of focus and time has been spent on figuring out what each of us fellows will do for our personal Deliberation Projects. The goal of these Deliberation Projects is to “enable Fellows to organize, host, and facilitate a deliberative event that connects to their personal interests…and builds Fellows’ capacity to conduct deliberative activities after they have completed the DCI Fellowship program.” After hearing this objective, it did not take long for me to figure out what personal interest I wanted to connect the DCI with – sports.

Sports, specifically basketball, have been a major part of my life from the age of 6 up until now at 22 years old. I have been on plenty of different teams with different coaches through these years, which has resulted in me experiencing a lot of different team dynamics. When I sat down to think about how deliberation and these past basketball team experiences could connect, it seemed clear. Teams get into heated debates and arguments all the time.

It is only natural when you have a large group of people giving their best competitive efforts to work toward a common goal that not everyone will agree on how it should be done. Tensions are bound to arise, and disagreements break out. My idea was that if deliberation is something that becomes incorporated into sports and teams, it would help to resolve many issues that tend to fester both on and off the court (or the field) for the duration of a season.

Ultimately, I decided to go to different sports teams on Davidson’s campus and speak to them about what deliberation is, and how it can be used on their teams to create a respectful environment where issues can be talked about in a respectful manner and resolved, instead of just letting them linger and fester. This decision, however, has also made me think about the benefits of deliberation in all areas of life, beyond sports, and beyond only D Teams and Deliberative Forums.

Deliberation can be used on so many occasions. If we think about it, we probably deliberate every day, although perhaps not always that productively. It may just be a small conversation in passing or a 10-minute “battle” on what the greatest television show of all time is. Just like people, deliberation comes in all shapes and sizes. My hope after completing the plan for my project is that people all over will begin to learn what it means to deliberate, and deliberate well, when it is appropriate. In our world today, much conversation that involves two people on opposing sides produces a disagreement, which then results in an unproductive argument.

People tend to value the positives and respectfulness of deliberation in their daily lives more and more often now than ever before. In our last DCI forum about social media and how we should be dealing with it, the members of my deliberation group during the second part of the event echoed these sentiments. In our group, there were two students, including myself, and three adults who each had children around my age.

As we were wrapping up our discussion, they told me and the other student how special this conversation was and how grateful they were to be there. Above all, they were just happy and relieved to be able to disagree with someone about a topic and not break out into a fight with them, but instead have just a simple conversation. No one was trying to win or make sure that they had the last and loudest word. They each said they miss when they used to be able to do this all the time with people many years ago, but not any longer – until coming to the forum and deliberating with us, together.

What Does the Rise of A.I. Chatbots Mean for the Future of Conversations?

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Clyde Dwyer ‘25 (DCI Fellow)

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) chatbots have taken the world by storm in recent months. It started with ChatGPT, a chatbot from the OpenAI GPT-3 engine, and has since generated a flurry of attention and concern about the growing role this technology will play in our lives. In one sense, we are nearing an exciting new frontier of knowledge and information accessibility, with chatbots capable of recounting historical events, solving complex equations, or giving you relationship advice. In another sense, the future of human interaction as we know it is at stake.

How does this connect to deliberation?

Conversation, collaboration, and deliberation are essential components of our lives. Especially in a college environment, information, and knowledge are diffused between students and professors of all different backgrounds and disciplines. Through my daily conversations and interactions, I learn about things that would have otherwise never crossed my mind. Like the science behind music, from my roommate, who is a Physics major and plays guitar. Or listening to my non-white peers talk about their experience attending a predominantly white institution, something that I’ll never experience as a white person.

There are clear benefits to opening yourself up to new perspectives and worldviews. This is true in conversations with friends and deliberations, where conflicting viewpoints and arguments occur. These benefits cannot be realized through the use of chatbots.

Of course, chatbots will never replace conversation and deliberation–– but it is very plausible that chatbots can begin to chip away at vital human exchanges of knowledge. For example, why study with a friend who is more proficient in economics than you if ChatGPT has all the answers? Similarly, why attend a book club to hear people’s thoughts on Harry Potter when ChatGPT can instantly analyze all the book’s themes? Why go to office hours with an esteemed, knowledgeable professor when you can spend time with all-knowing ChatGPT? One may balk at the possibility of these scenarios, but as chatbots become more intelligent and accessible, they are not outside the realm of possibility.

When I asked ChatGPT about the role of A.I. in the future of deliberative citizenship, it told me that chatbots could be harnessed for “increasing accessibility, facilitation of dialogue, and expansion of civic education.” ChatGPT may have some utility in deliberative citizenship. During D-Teams or deliberative forums, participants may be confused about technical aspects of specific topics–– an area where a knowledgeable chatbot can be handy. However, deliberation and communication with other humans are essential to promoting deliberative citizenship.

Chatbots cannot provide the emotional element that underpins logical reasoning and can never fully encompass the variety of human experiences. Take a chatbot and a person arguing for the same thing: Davidson should build more affordable housing. If you oppose this claim, the chatbot’s arguments will do little to sway you. However, if you learn that the person making the same point is a single mother who was evicted from her apartment due to increasing rents, this will certainly shift how you understand the situation.

Deliberative citizenship as a means and as an end will need to adapt in the face of emergent technologies. These technologies may threaten certain elements of human interaction and knowledge exchange; however, for deliberative citizenship, they can be harnessed for positive means and will not stand in the way of deliberation. Deliberation is a fundamentally human process–– one which engages both reason and emotion in tandem. Even in a changing world, deliberation is crucial to the future.

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay