Page 65 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

In the current political and cultural environment, public hearings and other civic gatherings

are increasingly interrupted by uncivil and hostile behavior at a high degree of frequency. Research

undertaken in conjunction with this project also explored how Community Conversation

participants address subtle or blatant hostilities among group members, and the characteristics of

discourse punctuated by disagreement. Tension and disagreement in the context of Community

Conversations and civic engagement can either disrupt the process or encourage participants to

engage in more meaningful episodes of sharing and exploration of differences, talking just long

enough to evolve encounters into deeper levels of understanding and new insights.

Community Conversation Participants (You Need to Have Them)

Participants of civic dialogue and deliberative democracy are not restricted to any

particular class or group of people. In fact, the very nature of participatory engagement in the

public realm is that it fosters broadly inclusive gatherings. A number of issues, namely, the subject

matter, location, nature of the invite, and the dialogue convener or reputation or personality of

host, affect any of the limiting factors concerning who attends and who does not attend deliberative

and participatory dialogues. It starts with who gets invited! Although there is research (Jacobs et

al., 2009) indicating that civic dialogue participants tend to be more educated than the average

population, a primary goal of participatory civic engagement is broad and diversity inclusive

(Block, 2008; Saunders, 2001; Walsh, 2007; Yankelovich, 2001). A premise of deliberative public

engagement that gives Community Conversations existential purpose is presumed to be

empowerment and action based on decisions agreed upon by those present in attendance. As such,

the expert model of information dissemination (banking), in which knowledge flows from an

individual from the outside to the dialogue group and in a unidirectional manner, is discouraged.

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