What We’re Talking About When We Talk About the “Civic Field” (And why we should clarify what we mean)

Abstract

The field of public engagement is experiencing a harmful identity crisis. While advocates of public participation may all agree that our work relates somehow to democracy, we have not established or articulated a common vision of what that really means. This lack of clarity has dire consequences, producing rifts between academics and practitioners, community organizers and deliberative democrats, civic technologists and dialogue practitioners, policy advocates and consensus-builders. Worst of all, the lack of clarity about democracy provides no help to people who are trying to create sustainable, participatory political systems in Egypt, Thailand, Ukraine, and many other countries. None of the participatory tactics and assets we have developed will reach their full potential if we don’t admit, to ourselves and the world, their true significance: these aren’t just props for conventional processes, but building blocks for new political systems.

Keywords

civic life, democracy, deliberation

How to Cite

Leighninger M., (2014) “What We’re Talking About When We Talk About the “Civic Field” (And why we should clarify what we mean)”, Journal of Public Deliberation 10(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.186

1117

Views

353

Downloads

1

Citations

Share

Authors

Matt Leighninger (Deliberative Democracy Consortium)

Download

Issue

Publication details

Dates

Licence

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Identifiers

Peer Review

This article has been peer reviewed.

File Checksums (MD5)

  • PDF: 2d1c9420cb5442257fbb870e5af55777