Monthly Archives: January 2018

where to invest to RAYSE youth civic engagement

CIRCLE has developed RAYSE (Reaching All Youth Strengthens Engagement) to help nonprofits, philanthropists, agencies, political campaigns, activists, and others decide where to invest in youth engagement or understand the strengths and weaknesses of the places where they are committed to work. It organizes data on all the counties in the US. This new video explains how to use it and also presents a broad strategy for renewing democracy by investing in youth. Get started by looking up your own county!

new Tisch College summer program for high school students

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Tufts Pre-College Intensive Program:
Leadership for Social Change
July 8th-July 20th 2018
Two weeks. Not for credit. Residential.

Join Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life for an exciting, engaging, two-week summer program created for those who are passionate about making a difference in the world and having an impact on local and global issues. With a lens toward advancing equity, inclusion and participation in civic life, the program will equip students with the skills and knowledge to build connections, work collaboratively, and emerge as change agents who can inspire others. The students will also tour several college campuses in the area.

More information here.

how to tell if you’re doing good

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If you have the capacity to affect other people, there seem to be three basic ways to decide what to do–and then to assess how much good you’ve done once you’ve acted.

You can talk to the people affected. You can consult your fellow citizens or even convene them to deliberate and decide together. The advantages include sensitivity to a wide range of perspectives and considerations, from justice to practicality; nuance and complexity; and the chance for people to learn and enrich their individual views. Asking people to assess and influence the policy also honors their dignity and agency. On the other hand, actually asking very large numbers of people to deliberate and decide everything is prohibitively difficult and expensive. Consulting samples of people fails to enhance the agency of everyone else. Further, discussions are subject to serious and pervasive flaws, such as cognitive biases, inequalities of power and influence, tyranny of the majority, and vulnerability to manipulation and strategic action.
You can predict and empirically assess the impact of what you do. You can use scientific methods to make predictions and test causal hypotheses. Science incorporates safeguards against biases, such as random sampling and blind review. It’s much more likely than deliberation to predict accurately what will happen if you do something. But it cannot determine whether your methods or your goals are good ones. And it confers power on experts (or employers of expertise) in ways that can be problematic.
You can observe price signals. If milk is selling for more than the price of producing it, then people must want milk, and providing it meets a need. The feedback from prices is immediate; it reflects many people’s knowledge, choices, and agency; it’s hard to manipulate; and it allows comparisons. Since you are responsible for allocating finite resources among all possible purposes, prices give you a common metric. One evident drawback is inequality. For example, market prices would suggest that there’s weak demand for clean water, even though 2.1 billion people lack access to it. They have too little money to affect prices. However, if you are concerned with justice, you can adjust price signals for equity. For instance, you can give poor people money and let them decide how to spend it, instead of dictating their choices. The other major problem with price signals is that they fail to make moral distinctions. Methamphetamine and antibiotics both have prices. It takes a combination of science (to assess affects) and deliberation (to discuss values) to determine that antibiotics are good while meth is bad.

All sectors of a modern society use all three methods. But I would argue that democratic governments are particularly obliged and well-suited to use deliberation. The fact that every citizen has a vote reflects: 1) the equal right of each person to affect outcomes, and 2) the obligation of every citizen to learn and discuss before making choices. For that reason, governments have formed parliamentary bodies and courts that are supposed to deliberate, they have safeguarded free speech, and they have built ways of consulting publics. Unlike a discretionary decision by a private entity, a government program must be subject to public deliberation because it is the people’s government.

Nonprofit associations and philanthropies use discussion and price-signals. But they are particularly well suited to use “science” (in its broadest form, including ad hoc experimentation and program evaluation). The fact that there are large numbers of modest-sized nonprofits and donors means that each one can try different things and observe the effects without accumulating dangerous amounts of power and influence. When their experiments work, others can pick them up. And unlike for-profit firms, they can ignore price signals in order to pursue goals that they believe in for moral reasons. This is why program evaluation is so common in the non-profit sector, whereas major governmental decisions–even massive tax cuts or wars–are hardly ever subject to formal evaluation.

Companies, obviously, use price-signals. If Toyota can’t sell enough Corollas at a profit, it will realize it must change its business. If it observes that Subaru is more profitable, it will consider copying Subaru. However, it’s worth noting that prices offer insufficient guidance even for profit-maximizing firms. Again, assume that Toyota suddenly cannot sell enough Corollas. It must find out why not, and that will probably require some combination of asking people what they value and studying causes and effects–the same techniques used by democratic governments and philanthropies.

Among people committed to democracy and/or philanthropy, prices provoke unease. When something previously offered free is charged for, critics will complain of “neoliberalism” and “marketization” or “commodification.” But if that good was scarce and provided to some group without a charge, then someone must have decided to allocate resources for that purpose and to that group (instead of to something and someone else). Those who make such decisions are morally responsible for exercising their power well. They should strive to determine whether their choices benefit the world. Consultation and science are two means for that purpose, but both have limitations. Prices are also very useful for determining demand and for making comparisons. Not only should responsible people notice prices, but they should worry about whether their actions (through governments and philanthropies) are distorting price signals in ways the deprive them of useful information about other people’s needs. For instance, if you offer free tuition, you can no longer tell whether schooling is what people want.

On the other hand, prices certainly do not offer all the necessary and relevant information, even for people and firms that want to make a profit–and still less for people who pursue justice.

2018 European Summer Institute of Civic Studies

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Call for Applications

We are happy to invite you to participate in the European Summer Institute of Civic Studies that will take place in Herrsching near Munich, Germany, from July 15^th to July 28^th 2018. The Summer Institute of Civic Studies is organized by a team from the University of Maryland (Prof. Karol Soltan) and the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt/University of Augsburg (Prof. Tetyana Kloubert) with Tufts University’s Prof. Peter Levine, who will join for two days.

The total number of participants will be limited to 20. We will consider applications from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Germany, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Poland, Russian Federation, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. [Revised list, 1/15/18] We are especially interested in applicants who have a long-term interest in developing the civic potential of the region. If you are from elsewhere in the world, the Tisch College Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts is a better fit.

Objectives and topics

The Summer Institute of Civic Studies is an intensive, two-week, interdisciplinary seminar bringing together advanced graduate students, faculty, and practitioners from diverse fields of study. It is part of an effort to build a new inter-disciplinary field of civic studies, aiming to develop ideas helpful to citizens. The notions of civic ideals, civic competence, civic society, and civic culture all capture in various ways the perspective of this emerging field.

Summer Institutes of Civic Studies have been annually organized by Peter Levine and Karol Soltan at Tufts University since 2009. The Tufts Summer Institutes has been organized around the theme of the interaction of theory and practice. They have aimed above all to establish civic studies as a theoretically serious field.

The European Summer Institute incorporates in addition distinctly European topics, such as the European Union. But within the European Summer Institute, with its roots in Eastern and Central Europe, we have also introduced a deeper second theme. We aim to develop the civic perspective in the shadow of past totalitarianism and its horrors. We look at modernity as a venue of civic work, with special attention to the fact that modernity also produced Lenin, Stalin and Hitler.

Civic Studies draws on examples from the practices of multiple civic society initiatives. Often the key question is strategic: What was practically possible and under what circumstances? For this purpose, examples from different international contexts are helpful, as they illuminate the possibilities and limitations of the establishment of civic perspectives. We seek to identify country-specific civic society projects, to search for a link between science and practice in the regional and international context and to promote intercultural encounters and intercultural learning.

The Summer Institute of Civic Studies deals with issues of development of civil society, the role of an individual/citizen in society, the role of education and the role of institutions in supporting, promoting and deepening democracy, and questions related to the ethical foundation of civic issues in a (democratic) society. These topics will be examined in international and comparative perspectives, considering European (especially German) and US-American civic traditions. International examples will be discussed in the context of consolidation of democracy in Eastern Europe, and in the context of the recent challenges of populism.

The Summer Institute of Civic Studies engages participants in challenging discussions such as:

What kinds of citizens (if any) do good regimes need?
What should such citizens know, believe, and do?
Should we reformulate the project of democracy in response to the challenge of populism, and if so, how?
What ought to be the relationships among empirical evidence, ethics, and strategy?

How to apply

All application materials must be submitted in English. The application must include the following:

A cover letter telling us why you want to participate in the summer institute and what you would contribute (maximum 2 pages)
A curriculum vitae

All application material can be sent as an email attachment in DOC or PDF format to tetyana.kloubert@ku.de.

Decisions will be announced in April 2018.

The working language of the Summer Institute will be English. Your mastery of the English language must be sufficient to read and understand complex texts from multiple disciplines, and to take part in a lively discussion.

Deadline

For best consideration apply by March 1, 2018.

Expenditures

The Summer Institute of Civic Studies is being funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). All participants will be paid for their travel costs, accommodations, meals and full event access.

Contact

For more information about the Summer Institute of Civic Studies please contact tetyana.kloubert@ku.de

We encourage you to share this message with your networks of people who might be interested by the Summer Institute of Civic Studies.

Tisch College / Sociology Postdoc in Civic Studies

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Tufts University Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life & School of Arts & Sciences (Sociology) Postdoctoral Fellowship in Civic Studies

Tufts University’s Department of Sociology and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life will award a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Civic Studies for the 2018-19 academic year to a scholar with a Ph.D. in Sociology who is not yet tenured. The Fellowship will begin July 1, 2018. We seek a sociologist whose research bears on civic engagement, broadly defined. Possible research topics include, but are not limited to, civil society, grassroots engagement, forms of citizenship, non-profits, social movements, democratic participation, and public sociology.

The Fellow will be expected to teach one academic course per semester in the Department of Sociology at the undergraduate level on topics related to civic life, in addition to conducting their research. In addition, the Fellow will be expected to deliver a public lecture at Tufts on the topic of their research, to contribute to the intellectual life of the university, and to participate in initiatives on campus concerning civic engagement as relevant. The Fellow will be housed in the Department of Sociology at Tufts University.

QUALIFICATIONS
Scholar with a Ph.D. in the field of Sociology who is not yet tenured.

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS
All applications must be submitted via Interfolio at: http://apply.interfolio.com/48127. Applications should include: (1) a cover letter which includes a description of your research goals during the fellowship year and the courses you would like to offer; (2) your CV; (3) one writing sample; (4) three letters of recommendation which should be uploaded by your recommenders to Interfolio directly; and (5) teaching course evaluations, if available.

Review of applications will begin February 1, 2018 and will continue until the position is filled.

Questions about the position should be addressed to Tisch College Associate Dean of Research Peter Levine at Peter.Levine@tufts.edu.