Thanks to the fabulous Tisch College postdoc Margaret McGladrey, we are holding a symposium on “Participatory Action Research as Civic Studies” today at Tufts, with 15 speakers.

I’m planning to make a few remarks revolving around three “ideal types” or imaginary characters.

I won’t try to explain the whole chart here, but a few explanations might be useful.

The community actor could be a nonprofit leader, activist, or government official. The social scientist could be qualitative or quantitative, teaching in a university or working for an agency or even a research firm. And the “philosopher” need not be a professor of that academic discipline. She might be a scholar from a different field (e.g., theology, normative political theory, law, education) or someone working outside academia, for instance, as a writer or a clergyperson.

When I say that the social scientist “often studies categories,” I mean that her topic is often a set of examples that meet the same criteria: Dominican women, prenatal care programs, kids who are existing foster care. In contrast, a community actor is often concerned with a heterogeneous, multifaceted object like a school or a neighborhood.

When I say that the social scientist “acknowledges [her] own values but sees them as perhaps problematic,” I am thinking about the disclosures of bias and social position that are increasingly common in scholarly articles. Traditional conceptions of science understand it as a quest to understand the world independent of the observer. Social scientists know that observers have values, bias, and assumptions. That is because we are all human. But they regard those attributes of themselves as potential obstacles to understanding their objects of study. So they use techniques for reducing bias, and they disclose or acknowledge their values for the sake of the reader. In contrast, a civic actor typically asserts values as a matter of right, as things that she has. Often those assertions are tied to identities: “As a Pentecostal, I believe …” Finally, a philosopher is trained (if we are trained in anything), to ask whether any claim about values is the best one. We view values not as biases to disclose but as claims that require testing.

In the middle are some “citizens,” using that term in its moral (not legal) sense. They are people who feel responsible for their world: for changing it or preserving what is good about it. They need what each of the three ideal types offer, and they can’t distinguish sharply among these offerings. They need particular and general knowledge, information and good values.

I take it that movements like Participatory Action Research and Community Based Participatory Research attempt to bring together the Community Actor with the Social Scientist, either by reducing differences among these people or by making them into partners. Civic Studies, as we actually practice it so far, tends to combine the Social Scientist and the Philosopher, but really it should bring all three together.

This is an agenda for research and education. It’s a way of organizing the major topics of our Introduction to Civic Studies course for undergraduates. It isn’t intended directly as a flowchart for civic actors (activists, leaders) because their problems are more concrete and more varied. But I hope that by addressing these topics in cumulative research, and by teaching the results (interactively), we can build a base of knowledge useful for activists. (See also the page about Civic Studies on the Tisch College website.)

In our Introduction to Civic Studies course, this is the zone we’re currently in:

We all need some account of what would make a good–or at least a better–society. This idea can be provisional and open-ended; we still need something to orient us. If you think that it’s easy to define “social justice,” consider that it was the name of Father Coughlin’s antisemitic and pro-Nazimagazine in the 1930s.

We must consider the potential of bottom-up, participatory, social movements to promote justice, because the powerful won’t reliably offer justice. However, reasonable people disagree about how important bottom-up politics is. Maybe top-down leadership or impersonal forces are much more significant.

Finally, we must consider how identities (what we are, as opposed to what we think) fit in. Is all politics identity-politics? Or should we distinguish between “old” social movements, which made universalist claims, and “new” ones, which are identity-based? If the distinction holds, is the change good or bad? Also, does justice require fair treatment of identities? And what is an identity? For example, religion: an identity or a set of beliefs?

As always, it’s our students’ job to navigate their own way through these shoals; I don’t offer answers. But I do think it is interesting to distinguish:

• An identity: “Speaking as a …”
• An interest: “I want …”
• An opinion: “We should …”

I’ll stipulate that we all use all of these forms of speech, and they are all protected under the First Amendment. Which ones are allowed is not a good question. But we might ask:

• Which of these can be right or wrong?
• Which can/should be subject to compromise?
• Which does one have a moral right to? (Relatedly, which ones do other people have an obligation to honor in various ways?)
• Which should we be open to changing, and why?

Here is an example of a view, although I am not wedded to it:

People have a right to their identities. Sometimes we should change our identities in response to new understandings. For instance, some people didn’t used to see sexual orientation as an identity, especially if they happened to be straight; now they should see heterosexuality as an identity. We should not, however, compromise our identities as part of a deal with others. We are usually right about our own identities, but not inevitably. We can lie or even lie to ourselves about who we are.

We should be open to compromising our interests in order to share the world with others. Whether to compromise depends in part on the moral standing of the other party. We should also be open to changing our interests in response to principled arguments, but that is a different process from compromise. We have a right to certain basic interests, but we can claim interests that we do not have a right to. You can disagree that something is my legitimate interest. I may even owe you an argument that it is.

Our opinions can be right or wrong. We should be open to changing them on the basis of evidence and arguments. We shouldn’t easily compromise them (in the sense of splitting the difference), although there are times when that is wise. Opinions should be sincere, so if you do compromise them, you should mean it.

See also: the New Social Movements of the seventies, eighties, and today; don’t confuse bias and judgment; and why study social justice?