{"id":17069,"date":"2016-06-16T18:23:06","date_gmt":"2016-06-16T22:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17069"},"modified":"2016-06-16T18:23:06","modified_gmt":"2016-06-16T22:23:06","slug":"being-a-friend-to-a-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17069","title":{"rendered":"being a friend to a project"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day, in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies<\/a>, we were reading a long review article about Positive Youth Development (PYD). PYD can be described as a set of empirical hypotheses with supportive evidence (e.g., that youth flourish best when given opportunities to contribute to their communities). Alternatively, it could be defined as a set of value propositions that may\u00a0or may\u00a0not be empirical (e.g., youth have a right<\/em> to contribute to their communities).\u00a0It can also be described as a set of programs for young people.\u00a0Those programs exist because of funding streams and other policies that can be categorized as PYD as well. And it’s a community of people–scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and maybe youth–who are involved with\u00a0PYD.<\/p>\n

Presented with\u00a0an article, you can read it, learn from it, agree with it, criticize it, assess it, share it, cite it, even assign it. But you\u00a0can’t be a friend of the article. It exists in its final form\u00a0and can’t be influenced. It can have fans, but not friends in a recognizable sense of that word.<\/p>\n

You can be a friend of something like PYD, assuming that it is a community of people or set of programs. Such a friendship can incorporate criticism–or even require it. For instance, I think PYD should be\u00a0more political. Youth should have more opportunities to change\u00a0official systems. I can say that as a friend of PYD, even as part of the PYD community. My friendship is predicated on a decision that PYD\u00a0has potential, that it is worth engaging. My friendship\u00a0does not depend on\u00a0my assent to any particular list of hypotheses or principles, nor my endorsement of any particular program.<\/p>\n

I say all of this for two reasons. First, academics learn how to relate to texts as critical readers. We are also supposed to learn how to relate to other scholars as people. But we\u00a0learn less about how to be friends of communities or movements. Some\u00a0of us are good friends (in that sense),\u00a0but\u00a0it’s not really part of our training.<\/p>\n

Second, I think the relationship between empirical hypotheses and actually existing movements is widely misunderstood. It turns out to be true that many youth flourish when offered certain kinds of opportunities to contribute to their communities. That claim of PYD is true because a community of practitioners set about to create such\u00a0opportunities and made\u00a0them work. The knowledge that we have gleaned through research on PYD is a product of their efforts. This doesn’t mean that knowledge is\u00a0subjective or relative.\u00a0Some programs succeed, others fail, and we can measure the difference. But no program succeeds without being designed and implemented, which requires a prior commitment by some organized group.<\/p>\n

The knowledge contained in an article about PYD is thus dependent on\u00a0people’s\u00a0work in the world.\u00a0You can’t be a friend of the article, but you can be a friend of the people upon whom it depends. If the article contains a mistake, you should notice that. If the programs fail to\u00a0work, you can help them to work better. A community can falter, splinter, or go in the wrong direction, but it can’t be invalidated.\u00a0That means that a critical response to a publication is disagreement, but a critical response to a movement is action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day, in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, we were reading a long review article about Positive Youth Development (PYD). PYD can be described as a set of empirical hypotheses with supportive evidence (e.g., that youth flourish best when given opportunities to contribute to their communities). Alternatively, it could be defined as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,26,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-civic-theory","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17069"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17076,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17069\/revisions\/17076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}