Page 417 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

being brutalized by law enforcement, criticized by media, tear gassed, and pepper sprayed night

after night.

Despite efforts at tracking these news stories I found that the incidence of civic sponsored

or any type of community dialogues that convened on race, racism, and oppression was low and

attempts to offer a CC dialogue on race that invited whole communities were constrained by trying

to get through to key people already getting hounded by the media and lack of spokesperson

availably, timing, and learning about how municipalities were dealing with these issues were

discouraging. That is why when I learned from the local NPR station that an actual Community

Conversation was going to convene within driving distance, it afforded me the opportunity to

observe up close each of the Albany NY dialogue sessions and brought to light the opportunity to

do this study. In-person observations, though informal, were particularly valuable to contextualize

current events and collect the data discussed by participant volunteers in terms of the dialogue

sequence, Metasphere creation and emotions displayed within interactive processes.

While the research focused primarily on the experiences of participants and facilitators of

a locally-based civic dialogue initiative, due to relatively low interest in participating in my study,

the pool of volunteer respondents was small. It is possible that not enough people were asked

directly and only few of those surveyed gave consent for follow-up, plus I am one person and in

neither city Albany or Milwaukee did the conveners who organized the dialogues announce to the

groups that I wanted to interview people or officially ask the facilitators to help distribute my

surveys (everyone doing an exit survey would have been helpful). Extending the research to

include a larger number of interviews with a wider variety of interview respondents will result in

broader understanding of how Community Conversation attendees and facilitators process and

experience Metasphere and work through tensions that surface especially with intense topics.

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