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