Public Work Academy

This review of William Sullivan's book on political theory, Reconstructing Public Philosophy, welcomes Sullivan's critique of decontextualized ethically arguments, but raises the problem that republican arguments are themselves detached from the practical, power-laden, self-interested dynamics of public life.

Harry C. Boyte argues that both the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement, despite their obvious differences, express aspirations for civic agency, which are widespread around the world, and which confound conventional political categories. Both are animated by the conviction that citizens must be at the centre of democracy. Yet both also have limits, defining the world as a

This essay in the journal Political offers an account of citizen politics and a political concept of citizenship that is about building the world, not simply participating in taken-for-granted governance processes, whether parties or other state-centered mechanisms, or the voluntary associations of civil society.

I trace the roots of productive citizen politics to self-organizing, practical, diverse communal organizing practices across the world. And I sketch several dynamics that suggest potential for the growth of citizen politics including the growing dysfunctions in professional systems; the lessons of broad based community organizing; the (re)emergence of citizen professionalism; and the emergence of a fledgling  democracy movement in higher education.

This piece, the lead article in a special issue of Public Administration Review on "Civic Engagement in the 21st Century," makes the case for a new understanding of democracy, as a way of life or a society, not simply a state system. This also entails a different role for government -- neither center of the political universe providing solutions nor enemy of the people, but empowering partners.

I argue that civil servants, elected officials, and government agencies have vital roles as catalysts, conveners and "citizen professionals" who work with other citizens in  empowering fashion, if they reclaim their deep civic identities.

... 36. Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore, MD: John ... William J. Doherty, Tai J. Mendenhall, andJerica M. Berge, "The Families and Democracy and Citizen Health Car Project," Journal of ...

This essay, in the higher education journal "Change," describes the emergence of the concept of "agency" in several fields, analyzes the technocratic dynamics in higher education which have eclipsed agency, and describes the empowering citizen politics youth initiative Public Achievement and its translation into colleges and universities.

This essay in the journal of engaged political theory, The Good Society, argues that Dewey was a "prophetic populist" who anticipated important power relations of knowledge societies. He argued that knowledge power is not a zero-sum resource but is enhanced through sharing transactions; that, nonetheless, cultures of research and academia tended to produce a detached, outsider stance that had to be overcome; that education needed to be engaged with the problems of society; and that all professions have educative democratic potential.

His mistake, common to the conceptual framework of the progressive movement but not universal in that movement, was to separate "politics" from "citizenship," with a resulting weakening of any strategies for deepening the work of democracy as a way of life.

This essay, in the forthcoming book collection edited by Eric Fretz, "Climate Change Across the Curriculum," proposes that connecting the climate movement to a deep, broad understanding of democracy and democratic change will greatly strengthen the movement while helping to catalyze a democratic awakening. The second draft, in August 25, incorporates considerable feedback.