Fellow Posts

By Coralyn Cairns ’29 (DCI Fellow)

On a superficial level, I think most people can agree that deliberative discourse is important to democracy, as communication and representation of diverse groups is a cornerstone of democratic beliefs. With that being said, critics of deliberative theory argue that deliberation is less effective in the maintenance of democracy than it is reported to be due to linguistic exclusion. In “Language, Power, and Persuasion: Toward a Critique of Deliberative Democracy” (2000), Margaret Kohn suggests, “Under the guise of equality and impartiality, deliberative democracy privileges the communicative strategies of elites” (p. 426). In addition to amplifying elitist voices, deliberation may also exclude non-native speakers. About 37% of Americans have no higher education experience, and one-in-five (67.8 million people) speak a language other than English in the U.S (U.S. Census, 2022). Thus, the conversation of how best to accommodate deliberators of diverse backgrounds is incredibly important in the current U.S. landscape.

The U.N. deems language rights as human rights and declares that states should protect the existence of linguistic minorities (U.N. General Assembly, 1992). If that is to be respected, then policies promoting linguistic pluralism should be prioritized over assimilation to a “language franca.” This, however, creates a roadblock for democratic discourse, or, does it? In “Towards Multilingual Deliberative Democracy: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities” (2025), Lisa Verhasselt argues for a shared understanding instead of a shared language. Regarding linguistic pluralism, she states, “it should not be viewed as a problem requiring a solution but rather as a reality to be accepted and incorporated” (p. 62). So how do we accept and incorporate language diversity?

The first and most obvious way in which multilingual deliberation can be addressed is through training multilingual facilitators. With Spanish being the second most spoken language in the U.S, many professions such as medicine and law are now encouraging bilingual skill sets. Similarly, we should encourage civic-minded individuals to experience and learn about different ways in which people communicate, whether that be through formal language acquisition or familiarity with how different social and cultural groups converse.

Beyond facilitator translation, some groups are advocating for the use of generative AI to streamline and enhance understanding in deliberation across language barriers (Kalampokis et al, 2024). It is argued that generative AI can not only translate but also aid in comprehension, which is often lost in translation, especially when deliberating on divisive topics. Tools such as mind maps and automatic summarizations could be used as supplements during deliberation to support the transfer of ideas.

Deliberative discourse needs to occur across linguistic barriers, whether they are due to gaps in education or differences in language. Deliberation is meant to raise voices and bring people together, which cannot happen if others are excluded. For example, Hispanic and Latinx people represent 20% of the US population and 14% of the eligible voter population, yet they make up only 11% of those registered to vote, and registration does not always equate to casting a ballot (Pew Research Center, 2024; NY Times, 2024). This statistic, of course, is not entirely shaped through language inequality; however, we should strive to make civic engagement as accessible as possible through as many means as possible. And this necessitates that, as people dedicated to deliberative discourse and deliberative democracy, we need to find ways to make deliberation inclusive of diverse language backgrounds.

Sources:

“Cross-Tabs: July 2024 Times/Siena Poll of Registered Voters Nationwide.” New York Times, 25 July 2024, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/25/us/elections/times-siena-poll-registered-voter-crosstabs.html.

“Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities.” United Nations, General Assembly 47/135, 18 December 1992, www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/declaration-rights-persons-belonging-national-or-ethnic.

Dietrich, Sandy and Erik Hernandez. “Language Use in the United States: 2019.” United States Census Bureau, August 2022, www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2022/acs/acs-50.pdf.

“Educational Attainment in the United States: 2021.” United States Census Bureau, 24 February 2022, www.census.gov/data/tables/2021/demo/educational-attainment/cps-detailed-tables.html

Kalampokis et al. “Fostering Multilingual Deliberation through Generative Artificial Intelligence.” EGOV-CeDEM-ePart conference, September 1-5 2024, Ghent University and KU Leuven, https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3737/paper22.pdf.

Kohn, M. “Language, Power, and Persuasion: Toward a Critique of Deliberative Democracy.” Constellations, 2000, 7: 408-429. doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.00197

Krogstad et al. “Key facts about Hispanic eligible voters in 2024.” Pew Research Center, 10 January 2024, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/01/10/key-facts-about-hispanic-eligible-voters-in-2024/#detailed-data.

Verhasselt, Lisa. “Towards Multilingual Deliberative Democracy: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities.” Representation, 2025, 61:1, 57-74, doi.org/10.1080/00344893.2024.2317781.

Jackson Strelo ’26 (DCI Fellow)

In a time where the answers to our pressing questions are often formed quickly – from the press of a button, or maybe from a 15-second clip from social media – it seems as if we’ve somewhat abandoned the art of holistic problem solving. At almost all stages of our lives, many of our learnings derived from thoughtless exploration. In our youth, we likely didn’t learn to not touch the hot stove because Google told us so, but rather because curiosity got the best of us. While not every conclusion that we draw requires us to dive off the high board, we must learn to occasionally draw some distance between an issue and our conclusions. In other words, we must practice the careful art of devil’s advocacy in deliberation.

Martin Carcasson (2014) identifies The Devil’s Advocate as one of his four primary deliberation styles. In his eyes, one playing this role raises perspectives that are not being expressed, a style that aims to complicate a particular discussion that may lack dimensionality or diversity. While this is essentially as far as the DCI Deliberation delves into Carcasson’s properties and goals of the Devil’s Advocate style, their limitations of its intention must be noted to truly understand its value and apply it in our dialogues.

As alluded to earlier, a good deliberation doesn’t need to be intensely probed to achieve the goals of this style, especially if the topic contains sensitive subject matter. I believe that the base of the philosophy of Devil’s Advocacy is the aim of challenging thinkers to avoid drawing too-swift conclusions. Thus, it’s important to understand that word choice in this role can be the difference between progression towards curious thinking or regression away from it. In our training, even as a participant in a mock deliberation, I made sure to be thoughtful about the climate at our table. Did anyone share particularly personal or intimate accounts of an interaction with this issue? Even if the answer was yes, was there a productive or empathetic opportunity to dig deeper? Depending on the answers to these questions, I may evaluate whether the topic is too “hot” to explore, or if there’s a chance to promote curiosity.

Furthermore, a Devil’s Advocate should strive to not lead participants – explicitly or implicitly – towards a counter-conclusion. For example, facilitators in a roundtable discussion on climate change should challenge the thinking or conditioning behind their ideas – “what if our community was a fracking haven, would that change your sense of our environmental policy?” – rather than their political orientation as it relates to an ideological attachment to the issue. Jamieson, Valdesolo, and Peters (2014) found that dissent roles affect both physiological and psychological needs, with targets of Devil’s Advocacy or similar dissenting styles displaying avoidance behaviors as well as threats to belonging, self-esteem, and other basic psychological needs. Of course, there is certainly some variance in the presence of these threats stemming from blindly executed devil’s advocacy, but much of it can be erased by following fair principles of deliberation.

One crucial requirement in effective and productive dissent is to strive to maintain an egalitarian attitude in terms of what perspectives the Devil’s Advocate challenges. While perfectly balancing the level and frequency of dissenting questions posed to the one, or many, sides of the issue isn’t always feasible within the structure of a deliberation, maximizing equality and minimizing partisan choices and implicit biases should be prioritized. This is not only necessary in terms of respect and fairness, but also in fostering a climate in which all participants are encouraged to voluntarily dig deeper as they contribute to the conversation.

The second requirement is anticipation – thinking about the potential immediate impact as well as the chain-reaction of a potentially contentious dissent. Will my attempt at a light-hearted dissent be viewed as such in the context of the topic, the language of choice, as well as the climate of the deliberation?  Have any parts of previous interactions or sections of the deliberation prompted the use of a more cautious approach to deepen discussion? Of course, it would be foolish and limiting to ignore creative methods to challenge the group to explore arguments and counterfactuals out of fear. However, the art of effective Devil’s Advocacy requires the ability to forecast for and prepare for friction, and to limit scenarios in which that friction violates the bounds of productive deliberation.

While I could write all day about how other guiding principles – empathy, attentiveness, humility, the list goes on – should bake into the ideal Devil’s Advocate, I want to end how I began by highlighting the growth potential of this noble art. In my facilitator training, DCI Fellows were advised to essentially “roleplay” their positions in our final mock deliberation. In doing so, understandably, we struggled at first to articulate our dialogues under these roles. On its face, it seemed like a bland attempt at preventing one-dimensional discussion. However, as the depth of thought required in our sections increased, we rose to the challenge of our given roles. How does this relate to Devil’s Advocacy? Well, that relation wasn’t apparent until we began our reflections. While most of us agreed that it was difficult to stand on our given positions, it also gave us each the chance to practice holistic argumentative inflection – the main goal of Devil’s Advocacy.

As I serve as a DCI Facilitator this year, I will be thinking of how to sharpen this tool, to both challenge my own beliefs as well my ability to invoke curiosity into my deliberations.

References

Jamieson, J. P., Valdesolo, P., & Peters, B. J. (2014). Sympathy for the devil? The physiological and psychological effects of being an agent (and target) of dissent during intragroup conflict. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 221–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2014.07.011

Madeline Kleiner ’28 (DCI Fellow)

Starting my second semester of being a DCI Fellow, I felt more prepared. I had learned a lot from my first round of D Teams about including more people in the conversation, when to step in and when to let the conversation flow, and how to make people feel comfortable sharing their opinions. The second semester, though, a new measure was implemented that slightly changed how my facilitation occurred.

As anyone who was on a D Team this spring would know, there were two facilitators overseeing each session. One held the role of leading the conversation and making sure everyone gets a chance to speak, while the other took notes on the conversation and stepped in if another perspective was needed. Every DCI Fellow gets the chance to cover both roles, which is an interesting way to see both sides of a conversation.

The group I served as a secondary facilitator for was pretty varied in their perspectives so I didn’t feel the need to step in that way. Taking notes, though, was a very informative experience. I had never looked at the conversation before as having tangible outcomes, but the notes served as a physical output of the conversation. Taking the notes allowed me a chance to deeply listen to what every participant had to say and how that influenced their relationships and conversations with other deliberators. For my primary facilitation later in the week, it also gave me inspiration on how best to lead the conversation to make sure that every deliberator felt that they came away from the conversation with something.

As a primary facilitator, having a secondary facilitator in the room served as a support system. Yes, I knew that I was mainly supposed to be leading the discussion on my own, but having someone else in the room that could step in if I was struggling was comforting.

All this to say, in a deliberation it is totally okay to ask for help. Some conversations are really tricky and having another person in the room can be helpful for resolving conflict or if you’re nervous to cut off someone who’s been talking for a while. For conversations that are more one-sided in opinions, the secondary facilitator is also helpful for providing another perspective to the conversation.

Finally, this secondary facilitator is influential in providing a tangible output of the conversation. There are times, especially in longer conversations like D Team meetings that last for two hours, where it can feel like the group has been circling the same point for most of the conversation. Writing down and reading about the nuances and the specific opinions of each deliberator in a systematic way can help clarify the group’s main takeaways and areas where they both agreed and disagreed.

Lily Ogawa ’28 (DCI Fellow)

Which one is the most persuasive to use in a deliberation: emotion or logic?

When asked this question, most people’s gut instinct would be to say logic. People tend to believe you more when you cite data and evidence to back up a claim rather than explaining using your emotion. It may also seem easier to engage in a conversation when the person talking is using logic as you would be able to support or refute their claims using logic. When using emotion, it may seem harder to disagree with another person as we don’t want to hurt their feelings.

On the other hand, deliberations without any emotion can ignore a major part of the topic. Emotion plays a crucial role in topics such as on the government’s management on the COVID-19 pandemic, which was one of our recent DCI D Team topics. Participants may have lost loved ones or have lost their businesses due to the pandemic. To say that these participants cannot share their emotions and must only use hard logic can make the deliberations feel out of touch with reality. Emotion humanizes these participants and their perspectives and adds a unique value to the deliberation that logic cannot bring.

With these thoughts in mind, the questions then become “how to balance between the two?” and “which one is more important?” Despite the popular belief that logic and emotion are polar opposites, Leonard Mlodinow, author of the book “Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking,” argues that they are interconnected. Emotion guides people to choose what sensory information to pay attention to and what data to consider when making a decision.

In other words, emotions shape how we think. Paul Dirac, considered “one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century,” encouraged us to “be guided above all, by your emotions” (Mlodinow). Even in the field of physics, emotion influences how we make assumptions or what path of mathematics we study (Mlodinow). Emotions can subconsciously affect how we think and absorb information.

In deliberations, emotions can play a vital role in showing the diverse perspectives of participants. While emotion should not dominate the deliberation, both emotion and logic are essential ingredients in having an effective deliberation. In my D Team meetings, participants often shared what they felt during the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, and what they feel now. They also shared data or factual evidence they came across. In other words, they used both emotion and logic to have a sincere and meaningful deliberation. Perhaps there may not be a perfect formula to balance between emotion and logic, but both emotion and logic can play an important role in bringing about fruitful conversations on difficult topics.

Work Cited

McDermott-Murphy, Caitlin. “Logic or Emotion: Which Is More Valuable?” Harvard Gazette, 31 Jan. 2022, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/01/logic-or-emotion-which-is-more-valuable/.

Mlodinow, Leonard. “Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking.” Next Big Idea Club, nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/emotional-feelings-shape-thinking-bookbite/31632/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2025.

Casey Scheiner ’28 (DCI Fellow)

For one of the first times in American history, the hallowed practice of deliberation is under attack. For years, conservatives have clung to the First Amendment as its source of authority to oppose a homogeneous liberal narrative from emerging on college campuses, companies, and the government. However, today, enjoying majorities in both houses of Congress, control of the Oval Office, and a sympathetic majority in the Supreme Court, Republicans have gone after one of the fundamental rights defining our country for over two centuries: free speech.

Free speech is a bedrock of all of the deliberations hosted by the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative. At the DCI’s Forums and D Teams, deliberators have a space they can enter where they can share their views without fear of retribution. In fact, understanding diverse perspectives is a key part of the mission of this organization. Tragically, in its first months in office, the current administration has not practiced such a reverence for the heterogeneity of viewpoints that have previously defined American politics.

The Trump administration has wasted no time decimating our right to deliberate. Its primary tool? The immigration system. While the (attempted) deportation of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestine activist, has drawn the most media attention, one does not have to publicly espouse politically sacrilegious viewpoints themself to draw consequences from ICE. Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown researcher, was detained in pursuit of deportation for the crime of marriage to a pro-Palestine activist. While DCI participants could freely deliberate on their views of Israel-Palestine campus protests and espouse any viewpoint, American permanent residents like Khalil and Suri could be deported for their position (even if indirectly caused by marriage) on the same issue.

However, Middle Eastern politics aren’t the only area of the world fraught with political landmines if one dares to challenge the administration’s orthodoxy. After immigration officials searched a French scientist’s devices upon his arrival in Houston for a research conference and discovered messages criticizing President Trump’s cuts to scientific research, they forbid his entry to the country, citing a fear of terrorism. While the Trump administration alleges that this action pertained to other information found on the phone, the French government maintains the grounds for his removal revolved around his dissident speech. Indeed, the bar for reprehensible conduct is even lower than highly public deliberation expressing heterodox views—just deliberating with friends and disagreeing with US policy, as this scientist did, is now grounds for expulsion from the country.

Even the world of TV and culture is not exempt from such an onslaught. In July, CBS cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert days after its eponymous host criticized CBS owner Paramount for its settlement with the Trump administration as it sought executive approval for a merger. In September, Disney suspended Jimmy Kimmel, another late night television host, following criticisms of his characterization of Charlie Kirk’s murderer and concerns that his planned remarks would further inflame the situation. The suspension came shortly after Federal Communications Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, threatened punitive action against Disney if they did not take disciplinary action against Kimmel. When our most high-profile late-night talk show hosts cannot speak freely without facing retribution at the behest of the federal government, ordinary citizens doubt their ability to deliberate without fear.

Regardless of one’s position on the war in Gaza, US funding of science, or Paramount’s merger, this renunciation of deliberation as a core element of American political culture should be disturbing to everyone. An attack on free expression is an attack on the foundation of authentic deliberation. Be it pineapple on pizza or the ethics of abortion, everyone has an opinion that does not conform with the majority view. In a world without pluralist tolerance, the saying “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” often attributed to Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria manifests itself. Seeing as few political outlooks align perfectly with that of the “approved” government stance, most worldviews will at some point fall in the crosshairs of a retributive administration. Without free deliberation, we all are left with two unappealing options: stay silent on any dissenting viewpoints or face potentially life-changing punitive consequences.

Worse yet, these assaults on free speech betray the logic preached by conservatives for years. Though conservatives have (often correctly) lamented the prevalence of “cancel culture” on the left, the Trump administration now seeks to cancel those who do not submit to its orthodoxy. Though conservatives have successfully campaigned for the end of racial affirmative action in college admissions, the Trump administration now pressures universities to functionally practice affirmative action for conservative professors. Though conservatives have previously decried Democratic administrations’ weaponization of the IRS against dissident groups, the Trump administration has influenced the IRS to audit high-profile critics and review Harvard’s tax-exempt status. As many Republicans recognized during the years when they were in the minority, freedom of speech is largely a mechanism to protect those out of power. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, Trump does not appear keen on respecting his foes’ liberties.

So, how do we resist the end of American deliberation? The answer is not that different from the Trump administration’s strategy of “flooding the zone.” One political dissident will go to prison; one million will cause a revolution. This “revolutionary” action is nothing disturbing or foreign to Americans—not violence or even disobedience, but simple conversation. As notable law firms and universities capitulate to financial incentives to be silent, individuals must express their constitutional right to free expression.

Daring to say one disagrees with the government is a tradition of American culture preceding any of us. Today is not the day to abandon that brand of criticism—whether you concur with 1% or 99% of this administration’s agenda. Be it on a social media account with one million followers, a DCI forum with a dozen companions, or a text chain with a friend, our comfort with dissent defines our position as the leader of the free world. Fear of retribution for such unassuming critiques only transpires under an authoritarian political climate that Americans should only be reading about in world history textbooks.

To avoid that reality becoming a defining chapter of our own history, it is time to assertively claim our right to deliberate. It doesn’t matter whether or not you echo the views of the government, your university, or any other important institution, so long as you do deliberate. Go respectively disagree with your uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Go to a town hall and tell your representative how you feel about the government. Go explain your perspective and listen to the perspective of those who feel differently about a particular policy. Go celebrate and claim your constitutionally enshrined ability to deliberate.

Opinions expressed on the DCI Blog are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views or positions of the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative.