Category Archives: audio and video

civic life and health research

This is an online lecture (video, slides, and discussion questions) entitled “Civic Life and Health Research.” It’s offered by, and thanks to, the Tufts Clinical Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI), where I hold a research professorship. Dr. Thomas Concannon introduces the CTSI and the session. I then offer four frameworks for understanding civic life:

social capital
collective efficacy
common pool resources
the public sphere

For each one, I explain why there are important empirical and conceptual connections with public health that have implications for both research and practice. Public health really serves as an example to illustrate how to apply these concepts, so the talk might be of some use in other fields as well, such as education or economic development.

(You can find and register for other free CTSI courses here.)

The “civic state of the union”

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This is the video from the “Civic State of the Union” on March 7 at Tisch College. The participants are Mara Liasson, National Political Correspondent for NPR and contributor to Fox News; Robert D. Putnam, political scientist, Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, and author of numerous works, including Bowling Alone; Shirley Sagawa, President and CEO of the Service Year Alliance and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; and me. We talked about the civic condition of the United States and what to do about it.

discussing civics on BYU Radio

I enjoyed a conversation with Dr. Matt Townsend yesterday on the topic of civic education. Here is the audio. Dr. Matt’s show has a national audience and is devoted to “talking about good.” We discussed the importance of learning to deliberate controversial current issues with people who disagree.

prospects for civic media after 2016

Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice is a new book edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis. I contributed the introductory chapter, “Democracy in the Digital Age.” On Nov. 16, I joined Eric, Paul, Ethan Zuckerman (MIT), Colin Rhinesmith (Simmons), Beth Coleman (University of Waterloo), and Ceasar McDowell (MIT) for a book-launch discussion that focused on the role of media in the 2016 election and the prospects for civic media in the near future. Here’s the video.

podcast on civic education and engagement in Catholic communities

Here, starting at minute 39, is my recent conversation with Msgr. Kevin Sullivan, Executive Director of Catholic Charities, New York, on his SiriusXM Radio Show, “Just Love.” We talked about why Millennials volunteer so much (I named a combination of idealism and structured opportunities and expectations), why civic education seems to work well in Catholic schools, why the media is biased against Millennials, why Obama ’08 and Sanders ’12 drew youth support, the difference between service and social change, and the argument for expanding service opportunities.