civic work

I participated in an interesting conference call with members of the

.

Although I’m a bit embarrassed because I haven’t done any work on it,

I’m listed as the co-editor of a proposed book that would describe recent

experiments in real-world citizens’ deliberations. The Consortium, meanwhile,

is committed to holding a conference for researchers and practitioners

during 2003. The purpose of today’s call was to explore the possibility

of using the conference to create the book—by inviting authors to

present preliminary drafts of their chapters. There are potential advantages

to collaboration for both the Consortium and those of us who are working

on the book.

I also met with the two students and two professors who are conducting

a project on journalism, funded by the Kettering

Foundation (I am Principal Investigator). Their project is to create

a website with material drawn from political theory that’s of practical

value for working journalists. The more fundamental goal is to explore

ways that political theory could be more useful to journalism, and vice

versa. They have decided to focus for now on two pressing issues: the

role of the press in covering a war; and arguments in favor of conscription.

They are finding more good political theory relevant to the second question,

but more news coverage of the first.