Harry C Boyte

This second revision of the speech to the Civic Engagement Institute of Wisconsin Campus Compact, first delivered March 20, puts the nonviolent politics, public work and civic agency alternative at the center of the current debates on college campuses between proponents of academic freedom and safe spaces. It argues there is a third way, focused on equipping students to be agents of their lives and collaborators with others in making change.

This revision of my address to Wisconsin Campus Compact’s Civic Engagement Institute, March 22, 2019, “Higher Education, Community Engagement, and the Future of Work: A Challenge and an Opportunity” argues that nonviolent politics is a crucial resource for addressing the dangers of the digital revolution, Artificial Intelligence, and the unraveling of civic culture. It is a first draft of a presentation for a symposium on Democracy and Education in a 'Post Truth Age, at the World Education Research Association Focal Conference in August, 2019, Tokyo, Japan.

This essay is adapted from my Institute for Humanities Research Distinguished Humanities Lecture at Arizona State University March 20, 2019. Here, I put tasks of organizing for democratic culture change and a Green New Deal in higher education and professions in conversation with current discussions and strategies for a Green New Deal and the emergent literature on participatory democracy.

This column in the September 26 issue of MinnPost previews the argument of "Awakening Democracy through Public Work," pointing to signs of "civic muscle" developing in the US and abroad. It also challenges current shriveled ideas of democracy.

This piece, the introductory essay in the new issue of the Kettering Foundation publication Higher Education Exchange, describes and analyzes experiences of the international youth civic education and empowerment initiative "Public Achievement," an approach to civic education that challenges both state centered (civics) and communitarian (service) theoretical frameworks. I argue that Public Achievement, for all the challenges it faces in an expert and market centered world, offers a new path toward a deeper democratic culture as the foundation of democracy.

This book lecture on Awakening Democracy at Augsburg University, November 12, begins with lessons from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s which are forgotten today. The philosophy of nonviolence as a different kind of power and politics is especially neglected. The book, Awakening Democracy, shows that it is possible to deepen nonviolent power and politics in four ways through public work, using stories to illustrate.

This talk describes the stirrings of a movement of civic repair and democratic awakening that generates hope in turbulent times. It is given on November 15 at the Symposium "New Frontiers of Civic Revitalization," sponsored by the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service (WIPPS) and the Public Work Academy, to be held in Wausau, Wisconsin.

This essay in "Evaluating Civic Youth Work "(Ross Rohold and Michael Bazierman, Eds. Oxford University Press, 2018) describes the developmental evaluation approach used in the civic agency and public work initiatives, with roots in the American civil rights movement, developed through the Center for Democracy and Citizenship. It contrasts such evaluation with traditional models, stressing that the centerpiece in such youth public work is development of civic agency itself.

This blog for Huffington Post argues that we need to reclaim politics as revolving around citizens, not politicians, parties, or outside experts. This is politics descending from the Greeks, as the way to negotiate differences and work out how to live together. Schools and classrooms are ideal sites. I illustrate with a contrast between two forums on racism.

This conversation between Deborah Meier and Harry Boyte, taken from Bridging Differences, an ongoing blog about democracy and education at "Education Week," involves an exchange of views about what educators can learn from organizers, what organizers can learn from educators, and what concepts like "democracy," "relationships," "public" and "politics" mean.

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 Manichean struggle between good and evil in ways that vastly oversimplify the challenge of democratization and that ignore insights of the other camp. The author advocates for a civic agency politics, which teaches skills of work across partisan and other divisions, incorporates insights of both camps, and aims at democratizing the cultural and institutional life of modern societies.

This essay, a Havens lecture at the University of Wisconsin Sociology Department on April 11, 2001, argues for a "Copernican Revolution" in politics, shifting from a government-centered and politician-owned politics to a citizen-centered and citizen-owned politics. Such a revolution does not ignore elections, political leaders, or government instrumentalities, but it envisions their reintegration into the larger civic culture and sees citizens, co-creators of a democratic way of life, as the foundational agents.

I use extended examples from the youth citizen politics initiative Public Achievement, which I founded in 1990 as an effort to bring the empowering citizen politics I had seen in the civil rights movement into contemporary life and young people's experiences.

I also argue that signs of such a Copernican shift are visible elsewhere, such as examples of democratizing change in higher education and professions, described in the "Citizen professionals and public work" section of my academia.edu site here

https://augsburg.academia.edu/HarryBoyte/Citizen-professionals-and-public-work

These need to be integrated into a new stage of organizing and a deeper movement for  widespread democratization.

This is taken from the introduction:

Politics, in a democratic sense, is best understood as the public work of citizens. It involves the action required to build and sustain “the commons,” the public institutions and collective resources of a democratic way of life. It combines messy, down-to-earth labors on projects of common benefit with a civic and moral imagination that asks “where are we going?”; “Is this where we should be going?”

A citizen-centered politics, “citizen politics,” has rich antecedents in our political culture and counterparts in cultures across the world. Yet it survives largely as a subterranean presence in crevices of contemporary society. Spreading citizen politics widely will require making much more interactive the relations between elected officials and government agency workers and citizens.  But the political universe cannot revolve around them if we are to see wide civic engagement. Citizen politics will mean re-conceptualizing the ends of politics, from distributive views (“who gets what, when, how”) to a larger conception, the creation and sustenance of our common things...To relocate civic authority among the citizenry will take a Reformation and a Copernican Revolution, combined."

In this essay, the draft of a piece for The Good Society journal, I compare Pope Francis' climate encyclical and other statements with Public Achievement, the youth civic empowerment initiative whose roots are in the black-led freedom movement of the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that both point toward a "Copernican Revolution" in politics and democracy that reframes politics as revolving around citizens, not politicians, and democracy as a politics that enhances the collective agency of citizens, in which religious and other leaders often come to the forefront. I also use examples of  broad-based community organizing and the "Blue Labour" movement in Great Britain as examples of efforts which have kinship with Pope Francis and his wing of the Catholic Church, also pointing toward the reworking of the practice and meaning of politics and democracy.

Power and the New Nonviolence – Becoming Repairers of the Breach Harry C. Boyte and Marie-Louise Ström " You will rebuild the ancient ruins…You will be called the repairer of the breach " Isaiah 58:12 Millions believe our political system is dysfunctional. " We the people " are divided. The New Nonviolence rebuilds civic life while enhancing the power of struggles against oppression.

This reflects extensive discussion and feedback on "Nonviolent Civic Life Worksheet."

This essay, published in Huffington Post and Education Week, proposes that when one polarizes, one purifies. Making Citizens, the recent report of the National Association of Scholars which proposes that left wing radicals have hijacked civics education in America illustrates. But purified, polarizing politics happens on the left as well as the right — with disastrous effects on the movement for democracy in the age of Trump. I will develop this argument in more detail.

This blog on Huffington Post explains why the new report on the National Association of Scholars, "Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics," is wrong in attributing a theory of unilateral power and partisan politics to the youth civic education and empowerment initiative Public Achievement.

This essay in The Nation argues that we need to build on the non-demonizing, relational citizen politics widespread on local levels and present in the Obama 2008 campaign and the 2012 Minnesotan United for All Families campaign for inclusive marriages, as an alternative to the Manichean, demonizing politics which is rapidly growing.

This response to Cristina Beltrán’s Political Theory essay “Going Public” endorses Beltrán’s effort to sustain a concept of politics as free action by unique agents against the grain of a technicized, marketized world. Beltrán illuminates the “festive anger” of undocumented workers coming out of the shadows of invisibility to
assert their humanity in the demonstrations of 2006. Yet, building on aspects of Hannah Arendt (but neglecting others), Beltrán mistakenly sunders public actions from the organizing work which led up to them. Her argument about labor is confounded by theory and practice of civic agency in broad-based organizations and elsewhere, which teaches the power, freedom, and civic authority to be gained from affirming that people co-create the common world, the commonwealth, through their work, even if not under conditions of their choosing.

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 sermon at Prospect Park United Methodist Church August 27, 2017, proposes the urgent need to vitalize and spread the nonviolent philosophy of power and love, expressed in a co-creative politics of public work. Here' is the link at the civil rights movement veterans site - http://www.crmvet.org/comm/17boyte3.htm

This is a draft of chapter one, "Citizen Politics," the first chapter of Pedagogy of the Empowered, forthcoming in 2018 from Vanderbilt University Press. It describes the difference between a citizen politics of public work and the highly polarized citizen activism common today.

It is usefully connected to the idea of "a new nonviolence," since public work politics from the outset has been informed by nonviolent philosophy from the American civil rights movement which in my view cultivates an epistemology and an ontology of civic respect for the potential of one's enemies, as well as one's friends.

The stories in Pedagogy of the Empowered can all be seen as building blocks for a new nonviolence movement, moving from nonviolence as meaning simply "civil resistance" to nonviolence as civic construction. Here is a Huffington Post blog which makes this point - "The New Nonviolence -- Stories of Civic Creation"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-new-nonviolence_us_59cfa66ee4b034ae778d4ad7

This chapter, chapter eight from the forthcoming Pedagogy of the Empowered (Vanderbilt 2018) explores the way a politics of public work, what we call citizen or co-creative politics, is beginning to appear in higher education. It argues that citizen politics is a path "identity versus post-identity" politics, a debate which now dominates public discussion of politics. I argue that the mainstream debate, represented by figures like Coates and Crenshaw on the identity side and Lilla on the post-identity side, is rooted in two contending epistemologies. On the one hand identity politics is closely associated with what might be called oppression studies, now an extensive literature growing from humanities fields (based on humans as story tellers and meaning makers, and exploring the social construction of identities of relatively marginalized groups). It finds extensive expression in Intersectionality. On other other hand, "post identity" politics, represented by Mark Lilla but also more broadly the social democratic outlook of figures like Tony Judt and the New York Review of Books, is grounded in scientifically based fields - natural and social sciences.

Citizen politics has affinity with some elements of both, but highlights narratives of agency and an ontology of agency, not simply oppression; offers a positive approach to democratizing change, and finds expression in Civic Studies, which seeks a synthesis of empirical, cultura/normative, and action knowledge.

Citizen politics also has kinship with "Disability Studies" (which in turn has certain resemblances with Intersectionality, but also significant differences). This is the reason that the Augsburg special education, founded with a disability lens, found such resonance with Public Achievement. See also "The New Nonviolence," a speech to the India Association of Minnesota, posted on Harry Boyte Academia.edu under public work.

This piece, a short version of the essay in the Colossian Forum on "what is politics?",  part of the year long conversation on "reforming political discourse, argues that we need a "Copernican Revolution" to relocate politics among the people, not among political parties or elected officials.

This second essay in the Colossian Forum's Respectful Conversations discussion on "what is politics?", argues that religions congregations can be empowering and educational civic centers in the life of communities. This is a new (and old) role, which has potential to repair the civic culture.

This chapter from Harry C Boyte, "Everyday Politics" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), describes the university-wide effort to revitalize the public and land grant mission of the University of Minnesota, from 1997 to 2003. The effort was informed by the political, public work framework developed by partnerships of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship. It highlights dynamics of institutional change largely missing in most civic engagement efforts in higher education, including attention to the meaning, conditions, and  discontents of professional work and dynamics of interests and power. across the whole institution and in the larger society.

This opinion piece for Minnpost, the on-line Minnesota newspaper, argues that nonviolence is a different kind of power, illustrated in nonviolent movements like the civil movement. The civil rights movement grew from local civic sites such as the hundreds of citizenship schools across the south where people developed a sense of power and learned to not to demonize even die hard segregationists . Nonviolence in civil rights is best understood not as pacifism nor as a tactic, but as a philosophy which refused to demonize enemies. It a different moral response than violence and it is also far more effective as a method of change than humiliating enemies.

Nonviolent philosophy is never more important than today when many forces inflame and polarize our public culture. I give the example of Denison University, where students are learning to work across differences on is the "party culture" and others.

Overview The following essay begins with a promising experiment in democratic agency and a peaceful and public mission of higher education at Tokai University in Japan. I argue that to build on this experiment in the context of manipulated politics and inflamed divisions requires three elements:
• Rethinking civic education from " civics " and " service " to politics of public work;
• Recalling the deep histories of free spaces which built peace and civic relationships; • Translating such experiences to higher education today requires citizen professionals who use their knowledge and skills to educate and engage people in civic nonviolent philosophy.

This is a draft on progress of an essay for the conference on "Civic Reconstruction of Higher Education," sponsored by the UMN's College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) and the Civic Studies journal The Good Society, November 16-17. Feedback is most welcome.

To counter the bitter, dysfunctional electoral politics today, we need to recall and revitalize the great legacy of nonviolence with another dimension. Nonviolence has generally been a method of resistance. "Civic" nonviolence frames it as a way to claim ownership and responsibility for the civi life of our democracy.

The violent student protests at Middlebury College raise questions of free speech and also more. They dramatize the need for  our whole society to move beyond the "Manichean," good versus evil mindset about issues and groups of people which young people learned from my generation.

We need a new public philosophy of common citizenship. The philosophy of nonviolence from the freedom movement offers immense resources.

This speech is revised after my experiences with the India Association of Minnesota celebration in the state capitol. It focused on the importance of self-organizing effort as constitutive of the New Nonviolence, using the example of the transformation of special education in Twin Cities schools.

This is the working draft of the argument in several forthcoming articles and speeches that makes the case about the immense power of nonviolence as "a different kind of power" and also how it can be translated into the very different "Age of Trump" through public work.

I welcome feedback

This completed version of my 2019 Distinguished Humanities Lecture for the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University incorporates insights from conversations through the week of March 18, in which I had extensive discussions with students, faculty and staff about a "Green New Deal." There is a basic difference between a bottom up citizen movement on  climate change, a "Green New Deal" with government as catalyst and partner, and a top-down mobilization by government, affiliated with dominant understandings of socialism.

The completed lecture also draws on earlier theoretical work, especially the essay, "Populism and the Left," for the journal democracy: A Journal of Political Renewal and Radical Change, as well as Craig Calhoun's essay,  "The Radicalism of Tradition," about the same time for the Journal of American Sociology. Both of us made the case that populism has expansive democratic possibilities because the concept of "the people" is far more open and inclusive in its possibilities than politics deriving from the ways in which groups are organized (or oppressed) in modern societies such as  class, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, geography.

I argue that how the democratic possibilities and potentialities of "the people" are developed is the great question of the age, on which other issues like effective action on climate change depend. In this lecture I argue possibilities that public arts and humanities make a crucial difference for developing democratic potentials of "the people." .

This is a book talk on the new "Awakening Democracy through Public Work." I describe, with stories, the ways in which the public work politics of the youth civic education initiative Public Achievement illuminates the deep and usually unaddressed problem of default positivism and its cultures of detachment across institutional life and professions in the contemporary world.

This is the final version of my 2019 Distinguished Humanities Lecture at Arizona State University. Here is the Iink to the lecture site

https://ihr.asu.edu/distinguished-lecturer

I argue the need for a civic and democratic populist "Green New Deal" movement and call for arts and humanities fields and practitioners to take leading roles in co-creating an energizing story of democracy as a society, including but much broader than a state system of representative institutions. Democratic society is grounded in the capacities and interests of everyday citizens.

Such a movement requires a new generation of "citizen professionals," skilled in thinking in large, public terms about their work, able to work in collaborative and empowering ways, and equipped to help turn their work sites -- from classrooms and labs to government agencies, businesses, and communities - into humane, empowering, and purpose-filled environments.
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The policy and governance approach of a democratic populist Green New Deal is experimental and iterative,  interacting with popular movements. It is akin to that of the New Deal itself, creating space and resources for a great deal of self-organizing civic action. It contrasts with the state-centered approach of the congressional resolution that uses the model of WW II style mobilization.

Such a policy and governance approach is theorized in Elinor Ostrom's concept of polycentric governance, developed further with David Wilson of the Evolution Institute to apply across many environments.

Ostrom founded the Center for the Study of Institutional Analysis (now Center for Behavior, Institutions, and the Environment) at ASU. She was our collaborator in co-founding the trans-disciplinary field of "Civic Studies" in 2007 and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009.

I conclude the lecture with a story of self-organizing civic action in the context of polycentric governance, by students the University of Minnesota who changed the approach of the athletic department to sexual harassment training.

These are several pictures accompanying my 2019 Distinguished Humanities Lecture at Arizona State University. Here is the Iink to the lecture site

https://ihr.asu.edu/distinguished-lecturer

I argue the need for a civic and democratic populist "Green New Deal" movement and call for arts and humanities fields and practitioners to take leading roles in co-creating an energizing story of democracy as a society, including but much broader than a state system of representative institutions. Democratic society is grounded in the capacities and interests of everyday citizens. It will depend upon a new generation of "citizen professionals," skilled in thinking in large, public terms about their work, able to work in collaborative and empowering ways, and equipped to help turn their work sites -- from classrooms and labs to government agencies, businesses, and communities - into humane, empowering, and purpose-filled environments.
.
The policy and governance approach of a democratic populist Green New Deal is experimental and iterative,  interacting with popular movements. It is akin to that of the New Deal itself, creating space and resources for a great deal of self-organizing civic action. It contrasts with the state-centered approach of the congressional resolution that uses the model of WW II style mobilization.

Such a policy and governance approach is theorized in Elinor Ostrom's concept of polycentric governance, developed further with David Wilson of the Evolution Institute to apply across many environments.

Ostrom founded the Center for the Study of Institutional Analysis (now Center for Behavior, Institutions, and the Environment) at ASU. She was our collaborator in co-founding the trans-disciplinary field of "Civic Studies" in 2007 and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009.

I conclude the lecture with a story of self-organizing civic action in the context of polycentric governance, by students the University of Minnesota who changed the approach of the athletic department to sexual harassment training.

This is a draft of the 2019 Distinguished Humanities Lecture at Arizona State University, to be delivered March 20. It argues for a different paradigm of democracy, citizenship, and professional practice to help catalyze a new movement of civic activation across the society. Here is the lecture site https://ihr.asu.edu/distinguished-lecturer

This essay in Minnpost argues that there are two paradigms of politics in proposals for "a Green New Deal." One is a top down government centered mobilization of the people in the tradition (explicitly invoked) of World War II. The other is a bottom up activation of civic energies and institutions in which government plays a largely catalytic role.

How these play out will be all the difference.

This is the revised essay accompanying the power point (uploaded to Academia.edu) for the JERA Symposium, "Politics and Education in a Global Age."

I argue for a shift in paradigm from democratic state to democratic society, and suggest many cultural, political, and historical resources in Japanese culture which position Japan for potential global leadership in this new paradigm.

This piece in today's edition of the on-line Minnesota newspaper Minnpost argues that, in an important sense, public work, especially when developed across communities, is a powerful answer to the erosion of social capital. It summarizes the argument from t he new book, "Awakening Democracy through Public Work"
https:l//www.vanderbilt.edu/university-press/book/9780826522184

This is a revision of my piece for the Populist Studies Workshop at Arizona State University March 15-16. It explores the roots in today's academic theories of populism in "mass politics"; describes the populism I learned in the 1960s freedom movement, descending from the popular movements against fascism in the 1930s; explains out our efforts to translate the citizen politics of the movement into institutional change led to a new understanding of the crisis of democracy, connected to the crisis in professions; and argues for the concept and practice of "citizen professional" as a way to counter technocratic creep and help revitalize democracy.

Thanks to Michael Lansing , Marie Strom, and John Schwarz for discussion and feedback on the first draft.

In this essay, in Sheldon Wolin's "democracy," a short-lived but  important journal of engaged political theory, I outline  "populism" as a citizen politics different than ideological politics of left or right.

I argue that "populism" is based on a concept of agency of "the people," different than the categories of modern social science and politics. The key to democratic strands of populism, contrasted with demagogic and authoritarian strands, is the presence (or absence) of free spaces where people can learn the public skills of engaging people who are different. These generate open, more inclusive understandings and identities of "the people."

In this essay, drawn from the 2017 Dewey lecture for the John Dewey Society, I argue that a positive response to the question raised by nine scientists in a Scientific American essay, “Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?”, February 25, 2017, requires a different kind of politics, citizen-centered, educative, productive, and empowering, as well as places to learn and practice such politics. Drawing on Dewey’s 1902 speech, “The School as Social Center,” I suggest schools embedded in communities as potential “free space” for citizen politics which transforms the widespread sense of victimhood into civic agency. This kind of politics in community-embedded schools can counter what Robert Kanigel calls the “Credo of Rational Efficiency” that drives civic unravelling, growing powerlessness, and a Manichean politics, accelerated by Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. Manichean politics is especially corrosive and disempowering and derives from the fact that hatred is the most efficient emotion to activate for cheap, quick political results. The essay details examples of citizen politics and signs of public interest in schools as free spaces.

This John Dewey Lecture at the University of Michigan (2007) describes the emergence of civic populist themes and concepts in public life. It remains relevant, and can be supplemented by my 2017 John Dewey Lecture for the John Dewey Society and the AERA Dewey SIG.

This essay is for a workshop at Arizona State University March 15-17, launching "Populist Studies." I take issue with dominant understandings of populism from the perspective of elite, government-centered theory, and "populisms" of left and right. I argue that all three variants leave "the whole people," in all their cantankerous plurality, out of populism, and also neglect the connections between formal politics and government policy and civic life,

This is a revised draft of my Education as a Civic Populist site, after the conference at Arizona State University March 15-17. It more clearly locates the signs of a new civic populism in the context of current politics in the age of Trump.

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 is the power point of my presentation for the JERA Symposium, "Politics and Education in a Global Age," 1 September, 2018, at the Miyagi University of Education, Sendai, Japan.

I make the argument that a shift of paradigms from "democratic state" to "democratic society" is required to address the dangers of "the age of the subject" and to realize its promise and possibilities. The presentation hightlights the ways in which the public work-democratic society paradigm moves beyond the bitter and highly unproductive debates between state centered assessment in education, called "evidence based education," and the communitarian approach,  a subjectivist critique of EBE. Public work emphasizes as the goal of education civic agency and the cultivation of habits of mind and action as well as cultures of learning necessary for the third paradigm. It holds potential for human flourishing and capacity to address our common problems far beyond existing dominant approaches.

The presentation also illustrates many emerging examples of the citizen politics and cultural lens (including substantial modern movements like the Obama campaign and the Theology of the People movement in Argentina which schooled Jorge Bergoglio-Pope Francis) that are wellsprings for the new paradigm. It concludes with a short bibliography.

This chapter in the collection, "Mapping Populism" edited by Amit Ron and Majia  Nadesan from a Populist Studies conference at Arizona State University, puts robust civic engagement involving an inclusive and empowering concept of citizenship and civic education that develops civic agency at the heart of democratic populism. It argues that conventional academic accounts of populism do not capture the heritage of actually existing populist movements like the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s with a pluralist, open, democratic cast. Democratic populist movements develop political and civic capacities to work across differences while seeking to democratize power systems. Key to these movements are free spaces, face to face settings where people have room to self-organize, to develop democratic imaginations and ideas, and to learn relational skills and habits of work and deliberation. "Movement hubs" like Jane Addams' Hull House settlement in Chicago and Highlander Folk School, the leading organizing and educational center of the civil rights movement, have played vital roles in catalyzing and sustaining networks of free spaces and the idea of movement hubs has renewed relevance for today.

In this 2017 Dewey lecture I answer affirmatively the question raised by nine scientists in a Scientific American essay, “Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?”  I argue that we need a different kind of politics, citizen-centered, educative, and empowering, as well as places to learn such politics and put it into practice. Drawing on Dewey, I use schools embedded in communities as a case study for developing civic power and citizen politics.

Abstract
http://www.respectfulconversation.net/
The nature of politics Boyte Essay #3
Sunday, December 17, 2017 at 06:19AM |  Harry Boyte
The Colossian Forum is rooted in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, a network with many evangelicals and conservatives. I believe this audience is important to engage in a respectful way. in this time of broad cultural crisis.

In this, my third essay in the Colossian Forum Respectful Conversation series on Reforming Political Discourse on the sub-theme of the nature of politics, addresses the questions raised in Jim Skillen’s second essay about what I mean by “citizen” and his probing the sufficiency of “technocracy” to diagnose civic erosion. Here following I elaborate the meaning of citizen in the public work framework -- the idea of citizens as co-creators -- giving a short genealogy. I also point to common ground: We need to dethrone the default positivism – the culture of detachment from a common civic life -- which has taken hold in professional systems and institutions across all modern societies. “Civic science,” a concept based on citizens (including scientists understanding themselves as citizens) as co-creators, is a workable alternative.

This is a draft of chapter four in Pedagogy of the Empowered, a book forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press on Public Achievement and its citizen politics. This chapter describes the rapid growth of Public Achievement from the late 1990s; stories from several very different communities where it took root; the way it doesn't fit in "program models," ideological politics, or conventional categories of youth development.

Pedagogy of the Empowered is undertaken by a team, several of whom co-author chapters and all of whom have been involved in interviewing and/or archival research. We welcome thoughts, stories, criticisms, and also strategies for telling the story. we believe it is of crucial importance to democracy at this moment in the US and around the world.

This interview in the International Affairs Forum, Spring, 2017, now on line, Harry Boyte describes his experiences and theorization of populism in America from the 1960s until today.

The link is here http://www.ia-forum.org/Content/ViewInternalDocument.cfm?ContentID=8726

Boyte begins with an encounter with the Klu Klux Klan in the civil rights movement,  and Martin Luther King's subsequent assignment for him to organize poor whites. He describes his developing theorization of "civic populism," focused on agency and citizen co-creation and responsibility for a democratic way of life and its commonwealth of shared goods, and its differences with traditional ideologies of left and right and also ideological populisms. Civic populism, Boyte argues, has a renewed and growing relevance in the digital age as a citizen politics which can reintegrate information systems and institutions into cultural contexts and human relationships. It reframes issues of many kinds -- education, health, environment, economic development and others - from the state centered liberal question or the market centered conservative question to a civic question.

A positive political alternative to the rise of demagogic populism will require a vibrant vision of democratic society and the empowerment of individuals to work through these differences. Universities should not be just observers, but engaged participants. In the inflamed and divided public culture of the United States, we need a different understanding of populism than today's ideological anti-corporate progressivism and anti-government conservatism. The alternative is populist citizen politics, a politics of popular empowerment and democratic change across partisan divides. Citizen politics aims to repair civic life as well as democratize concentrated power, both corporate and technocratic. Higher education will play a crucial role guiding such populism as it recovers its relational and civic soul. There is a rich tradition of civic and relational practices on which to build. It is a mistake to underrate the civic and relational revitalization in and around colleges and universities—this leads to undue fatalism and hopelessness. Populisms left and right: The Manichean mindset In 2016, populism was a ubiquitous trope for describing the US election. " Trump and Sanders: Different Candidates with a Populist Streak, " reported Chuck Todd on NBC. Most commentators used populism to describe the inflammatory rhetoric of the people against various elites. This approach is paralleled in academic literature. Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell express prevalent views in defining populism as an ideology that " pits a virtuous

In this summary of my John Dewey Lecture, I argue that "schools as civic centers," in the tradition of Hull House settlement in Chicago and as envisioned by John Dewey in his 1902 lecture, "The School as Social Centre," can play an anchoring role for a democratic renaissance and the rebirth of a cross partisan citizen politics.

This is the draft of the John Dewey Society annual lecture for 2017, to be delivered on April 27, 2017, at the JDS and AERA conference.

I argue one strategy to win "the struggle for our freedom" in the the rising domination of "smart machines," often manipulated by narrowly self-interested elites, is to renew John Dewey's vision from his 1902 address, "The School as a Social Centre." To build a movement around this vision we need to build on the strong stirrings of a movement for community schools already underway, and to develop and spread "citizen politics," a cross-partisan politics of empowerment that draws on recent democratic movements and organizing experiences.

In this revised introduction to my Dewey lecture, slightly retitled -- "Citizen Politics and Schools as Civic Centers - 'Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?, to be delivered at the John Dewey Society April 27 in San Antonio, I further clarify the the focus and structure of the argument in the lecture. I welcome comments.

This is the April 6 draft of my Dewey lecture, "Citizen Politics and Education: 'Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?'" to be delivered to the annual meeting of the John Dewey Society in San Antonio, April 27, 2017. In the lecture I pose the question asked in a recent Scientific American essay by nine computer and digital scientists and leaders in digital technology, answering in the affirmative. I explore what John Dewey's pragmatic philosophy and educational reform efforts have to contribute, the limits of these in his overly individualist and apolitical theory of power, the ways these limits can be addressed usefully with the concept of relational power, developed politically by the Industrial Areas Foundation; Martin Luther King's philosophy of nonviolence; deliberative theory and practice; and concepts from civic studies such as public work and citizen professionalism. Finally,  I make a case for a movement, drawing on and developing in more political terms Dewey's idea of school as social centre," arguing it holds potential to help "create publics" across partisan inflammation; challenge effectively elite control, left and right, over education policy, and reaffirm the priority of the human over the machine.

In this updated version of my March 28 Education Week blog, I argue that in learning civic skills and taking public action through citizen politics students, often on the margins, can change educators' expectations and challenge school cultures. They also illustrate the power of "a different kind of politics" beyond the Manichean model of politics. The citizen politics challenge to the Manichean model shifts from the dominant focus on government and also the zero-sum, good versus evil default framework to a nonviolent relational politics that incorporates civic repair and public creation that widens the political landscape to "society," not simply "state."

This short essay in Education Week and Huffington post responds to David Randall's blog, Does Civics Belong in the Classroom? Randall charges that service learning, community engagement, and initiatives like Public Achievement in higher education are the result of a plot to replace "old civics" (voting, serving in juries, etc) with a "new civics" aimed at turning young people into left wing activists.

In this response, I argue that we need an approach focused on expansive concepts of citizenship, breaking out of the binaries of left and right, repairing our civic life and concepts of government as the partner of a free citizenry. Traditions like the citizenship schools of the freedom movement, Jane Addams settlement house, community and adult education, and cooperative extension in land grants and historically black colleges and universities provide deep resources, with old, extensive roots in American history.

This piece, published in Huffington Post October 14, argues that the civil rights movement embodied a citizen-centered view of democracy which has been eroded over the past several decades by the rise of technocratic, therapeutic, state-centered and politician-centered politics and concepts of democracy. This election may mark a turning point, including a new movement of "citizen therapists" who refocus on cultivation of agency, individual and collective, as their fundamental purpose.

Citizens as co-creators, the central theme of the new field of Civic Studies, adds dimensions of power to the power of the vote  and power to the people beyond the vote. It holds potential to revive cooperative labors, cultural pluralism, and a commitment to our shared commonwealth.

This essay, forthcoming in the "Encyclopedia of American Governance" edited by Stephen L. Schechter (Macmillan, 2016), describes the political concept of civic agency and its genealogy.

The concept of cIvic agency has emerged out of organizing which translates the citizen politics  of community organizing and the theory of free spaces where people have  space to self-organize for democracy change,  into institutional change efforts in schools, colleges, and elsewhere. These have also highlighted contemporary challenges to civic agency such as technocracy, consumer identities, and  hyper-competitive individualism. The partnerships of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, first at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute, now merged into the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, have been central to this conceptual development.

This short book tells the story of Idasa (earlier the Institute for Democracy in South Africa). Idasa played a too little known but crucial role in the end of apartheid, organizing hundreds of forums across the racial divide. After the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela, the organization worked in South Africa and across Africa on many levels to promote a citizen politics across ideological differences, from Parliamentary monitoring to grassroots citizen education, with the aim of building democratic societies.

Idasa ended in 2012, a casualty of the 2008 global economic crisis and changing international priorities. But for years it demonstrated the possibility of democratic politics, beyond ideology, on a large scale. Its successes and ultimate fragility are full of lessons for democracy building.

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

Building democracy in schools is best thought of as a strand of a larger strategy to resist the rising authoritarian dangers of our time. Such a strategy calls for cross-partisan politics, organizing that sees the democratic potential in every kind of community, and a commitment to defending democracy and also deepening democracy.

This opinion piece published at BillMoyers.Com argues that the Trump campaign surfaces deep strands of elitism among American opinion-shapers. The way to defeat Trump - and "make America great again" -- is to remember that the people are the architects of democracy.

This essay, in the special symposium of The Good Society on theory building of the "Bloomington School" for which Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, argues the need to complement a focus on governance of common pool resources with an emphasis on the work of creating and sustaining such resources.

This blog for Huffington Post, expanding on the conversation which Deborah Meier and I are having on "Education Week," argues that we need a Copernican Revolution in the way we think about politics to put citizens, not politicians and parties, at the center.

This is a reflection on the recent book by Ian Shapiro, "Politics Against Domination" (Harvard Press, 2016), forthcoming in a symposium on Shapiro's work in The Good Society. It grows out of a seminar hosted by Shapiro and moderated by Trygve Throntveit at Yale, February 8-9, 2018 at Yale.

This opinion column in the St. Paul Pioneer Press tells of my own formative experiences in the civil rights movement working for Martin Luther King; the civic organizing efforts through the Humphrey Institute (School) at the University of Minnesota and Augsburg, and the powerful story of Clear Vision Eau Claire, Wisconsin, about the makings of a "new civic covenant."

This is a sermon for Martin Luther King Day, to be delivered on January 20, 2019 at Prospect Park United Methodist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It argues for the renewal of the movement for the dignity and value of work launched by striking garbage workers in 1968, made famous in King's speech "All Labor Has Dignity."

This short essay for Huffington Post argues that devaluation of the value of work and working people is behind a good deal of the support for Trump and other demagogues. Blacks and other minorities also suffer from such devaluation, and there may be possibilities for a new interracial coalition.

This is the power point for my address to the University of Tokyo symposium, "Preparing Citizen Professionals - New Dimensions of Civic Education in Higher Education, September 3, 2018. This is the link http://www.schoolexcellence.p.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/event/1687/

I argue that to effect the shift from "democratic state" to "democratic society" will require a paradigm shift in civic education from "civics" and "service" to public work, aimed at developing the civic agency of students and others. Public work style civic education requires citizen professionals who are able to open and sustain "free spaces," learning cultures where people develop civic agency.

This draft chapter three of Pedagogy of the Empowered (Boyte et al, Vanderbilt 2018) describes how Public Achievement began in Minnesota, growing from a partnership with the MN Department of Education and the Mayor's Office of St. Paul. It found a home for incubation and development in St. Bernard's Grade School in St. Paul.

This blog in Huffington Post argues that the hollowing out of the public meanings of work is closely liked to the unraveling of the social fabric -- and a background to the terrible violence in Las Vegas. Nonviolence and public work, both aimed at civic construction, are crucial resources to reverse the process.

This chapter in Herman Wasserman and Anthea Garman, "Media and Citizenship in South Africa," forthcoming HSRC 2017, describes the role of journalists as public story tellers, in a narrative of democracy in which "the people" are at the center. It begins with a quote from C. Wright Mills:

The writers among us bemoan the triviality of the mass media, but why … do they allow themselves to be used in its silly routines by its silly managers? These media are part of our means of work, which have been expropriated from us … we ought to repossess our cultural apparatus and use it for our own purposes.

This speech for the Doctoral Research Symposium of St. Mary's University, March 11, 2017, argues that the Lasallian tradition of education has tremendous resources for a new nonviolent citizenship movement which can push back against growing social fragmentation and division. Citizen professionals schooled through this tradition can play key roles.

This blog in Huffington Post features Ali Oosterhuis, who is working with other students at the University of Minnesota and Augsburg College to organize "a citizen student movement," equipping themselves with civic and political skills and knowledge to be change agents through their careers.

For the purpose of building a 21st century democracy education movement, it's useful to explore connections between the commonwealth tradition and its "common school movement" expression and recent democracy in education efforts like the Coalition for Essential Schools.

In this Huffington Post profile of Paul Pribbenow, president of Augsburg College in Minneapolis, I show how the theological concept of "semper reformanda," usually taken to mean "always reforming" but more fully to be understood as "radical" in the meaning of "return to the roots," neither liberal conservative, is a useful way to think about Pribbenow's work and vision as a college president. Pribbenow combines a vision of pluralist community -- Augsburg as the "face of a new America" undergoing dramatic demographic changes -- with an understanding of the college as pushing back against the radically individualist trends of the age. He also sees Augsburg as preparing students to be "citizen professionals" equipped with the skills of making changes in institutions of all kinds, "reweaving and recommunalizing" the social fabric.

This profile from Huffington Post describes the work of Adam Weinberg, President of Denison University and a leader in the Kettering Foundation initiative, "College Presidents and the Civic Purposes of Higher Education."  Weinberg is pioneering in exploring how colleges, as complex organizations with significant power and presence in the life of communities, can enhance civic agency on campuses and in the larger environment. Here is the Huffington link http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/57eec332e4b095bd896a0d4f?timestamp=1475268799786

This piece in Huffington Post, adapted from an essay in The Nation, argues that education can be a seedbed for creating free spaces, reconnecting work and public purpose, and fighting effective "Trumpism" with a revitalized democratic movement.

This essay, the written text of the 2017 Kamm Lecture delivered on February 21, 2017, at Oklahoma State University-Stillwater, develops the idea of "educating the citizen professional" as the next stage of the civic engagement movement in higher education.

In this blog  for the Huffington Post, Harry Boyte describes the launch of a new movement against anti-democratic tendencies, "Citizen Therapists Against Trumpism," and connects that to positive signs of democratic change, including recent work like Pope Francis' Laudato Si' which gives a "name" to Foucault's disciplinary power.

This piece for Huffington Post, drawing on the ongoing "Education Week" conversation about democracy in education with Deborah Meier, argues for a policy called Cooperative Education. Cooperative Education ties together academic study, including the liberal arts, and work experiences. It counters the strong tendency toward sentimentalized citizenship which developed in the 1990s, embodied in Bill Clinton's "Big Citizenship" and attack on government.

At Augsburg College, as in many other higher educational communities, there has been growing conflict and tensions about controversial issues. Yet in the spirit of civic organizing and civic studies, challenges can also be opportunities for collective capacity building.

This faculty development workshop on "Navigating Hot Button Topics,"  as a collective challenge that faculty, students and staff will need to address collectively, draws on both the co-creative process and the content of civic studies and the public work approach to address the challenge.

In this address February 25, 2016, to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, part of a lecture series on "Prioritizing Undergraduate Education at Illinois," I argue the need to move beyond two oppositions now widespread in higher education, which dramatically weaken its linkages to larger publics and thus its power in a time of challenge and change. Beyond "education for global citizenship" versus inward-looking nationalism," I argue for "democratic internationalism," recognizing the importance of mutual learning across all societies which aspire to democratic purposes, practices, and values and also the need for such learning to be grounded in democratic patriotism, a conception of democracy as a way of life co-created by diverse citizens.

Against the common opposition between pressures for career and vocational orientation in higher education, on the one hand, and liberal arts and civic learning, on the other, I argue for "citizen professionalism," preparing our students (and ourselves as educators) to be political agents of democratic and humane transformation of institutions, professions, and community life.

In a time of widespread feelings of powerlessness in higher education, we need to move beyond "education for global citizenship" as the goal and also the conflict between "liberal arts" and "career preparation."

We need to educate students -- and ourselves as educators -- to be citizen professionals who are also democratic patriots, loving America, warts and all, and its democratic promise.

In this introduction to the new collection, "Democracy's Education: Citizenship, Public Work, and the Future of Colleges and Universities," I argue that attention to the public meanings and possibilities of "work" in higher education and in the work we prepare our students to do in the world is crucial to democratic change in our societies.

This essay, written for the Media and Citizenship Project at Rhodes University, argues for a new (and revitalized) public role for journalists as public story tellers, in an understanding of democracy as a way of life built through the public work of citizens. It draws on comparative examples from the US and South Africa.

This response, in Political Theory, to Cristina Beltrán’s essay “Going Public” endorses Beltrán’s effort to sustain a concept of politics as free action by unique agents against the grain of a technicized, marketized world. Beltrán illuminates the “festive anger” of undocumented workers coming out of the shadows of invisibility to
assert their humanity in the demonstrations of 2006. Yet, building on aspects of Hannah Arendt (but neglecting others), Beltrán mistakenly sunders public actions from the "work" which led up to them. Her argument about
work is confounded by theory and practice of civic agency in broad-based organizations and elsewhere, which teaches the power, freedom, and civic authority to be gained from affirming that people co-create the common world, the commonwealth, through their work, even if not under conditions of their choosing.