A New Approach to Politics and Professions: The What and Why of “Civic Studies”

Harry Boyte, Senior Scholar, Institute for Public Life and Work

Marie Ström, Director of Education, Institute for Public Life and Work

Trygve Throntveit, Research Professor in Higher Education and Associate Director, Center for Economic and Civic Learning, Ball State University Teachers College; Director, Institute for Public Life and Work

Ball State University has recently approved a new minor with the title, “Civic Studies.” What is Civic Studies? What does it have to do with students’ preparation for public and professional life? And why is this an important time to invest in the civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions not only of college students, but of “We the People” in general?

“What should we do?” The development of Civic Studies

Founded by seven publicly engaged political theorists in 2007, Civic Studies is woven of many theoretical and practical strands, including political philosophy, education, history, economics, cultural studies, and applied sciences such as engineering and public health. “The goal of civic studies is to develop ideas and ways of thinking helpful to citizens, understood as co-creators of their worlds,” reads the website of Civic Studies at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Citizenship, a hub of the emerging field. “Civic Studies is the intellectual component of civic renewal, the movement to improve societies by engaging their citizens”—not just those with a particular legal status, but the people as a whole.

Peter Levine, an architect of Civic Studies at Tufts, frames the field’s central question as, “What should we do?” This question involves examining facts (what is going on?) and clarifying values (what would be good?) to develop strategies (what might work to make things better?). Good strategies, Levine argues, “may take many forms… but if a strategy addresses the question ‘What should we do?’, then it must guide our own actions–it cannot simply be about how other people ought to act.”

More specifically, Civic Studies is concerned with putting scholars and other professionals back in the world as civic actors—”citizen professionals”—not aloof observers or managers. This counters long-developing trends which isolate scholars and professionals from their fellow citizens. Civic Studies has already catalyzed a growing global community of citizen professionals, and a growing body of civic scholarship and practice:

• Eleven Civic Studies Institutes have been held at Tufts and others at academic institutions in Germany, Ukraine, Mexico and Virginia. An estimated 500 people participated.

• A Civic Studies-Related Group has formed as a section of the American Political Science Association, co-chaired by Peter Levine and Trygve Throntveit.
• Civic Studies Majors are established at Tufts University and McMaster College in Ontario and Minors at James Madison University and Ball State University. Tufts hosts two endowed Civic Studies chairs.
• In 2014, the American Association of Colleges and Universities published Civic Studies: Approaches to the Emerging Field a volume co-edited by Peter Levine and Karol Soltan, both co-founders of the field.
• The Good Society, the official journal of Civic Studies since 2016, regularly publishes articles on theory and practice related to Civic Studies. The current issue includes essays on five democratic experiments at colleges and universities in the United States, and compelling stories of civic agency abroad. The next issue takes up themes of “the commons” as a framework for co-creative self-government and civic learning as a response to political dysfunction.
• A team led by Throntveit has developed and piloted a multi-institutional undergraduate course, Third Way Civics, which positions students as co-creators of a pluralist story of America. In this fast-spreading approach, faculty are mentors and facilitators, not instructors. Students engage primary sources with different views on critical moments in American history, negotiating different perspectives.
• The Texas HBCU Democracy Schools Alliance advances key Civic Studies ideas of public work, civic politics, and citizen professionalism to reclaim the expansive vision of the Freedom Movement.

Civic politics: A larger vision of democracy and a civic view of professions

At the center of Civic Studies lies a commitment to a different kind of politics, one that expands democracy beyond voting and consuming goods and services to include and elevate the self-directed, creative, collaborative work of citizens. The field’s founding statement of 2007, “The New Civic Politics,” drew on years of discussions among engaged political theorists in the pages of The Good Society and elsewhere, focused on articulating alternatives to dominant statist and market-based political frames. A crucial site of intellectual and practical work toward civic politics was the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota, where CDC partnerships incubated and tested several ideas that became central to Civic Studies: the concepts of citizen-owned politics; citizen professionals, who are “on tap not on top”; citizens as co-creators of the commonwealth; and democracy as the “public work” they undertake to build it. From 1993 to 1995, for example, the CDC organized the ideologically diverse Reinventing Citizenship alliance, bringing foundations, universities, and religious and civic groups into collaboration with the White House Domestic Policy Council. Reinventing Citizenship helped to shape President Bill Clinton’s 1995 State of the Union address, which argued that the heart of democracy is the work of citizens, across lines of difference.

These and other efforts point toward a needed and nascent civic political movement with the following features:
• Civic politics abjures ideological blueprints that reduce the scope and efficacy of creative citizen action, drawing instead on pragmatic philosophical traditions and pluralistic democratic movements like the U.S. civil rights movement, Polish Solidarity, the nonviolent Indian struggle for independence, the South African anti-apartheid struggle, and broad-based community organizing.
• Civic politics is the politics of co-creators of a democratic society. It is a politics of civic empowerment, teaching skills that equip citizens to shape their worlds and build the commonwealth.
• Civic politics is a resource for humanizing, democratic changes in expert-dominated professions and technocratic institutions, from government to education, health, and business.
• Civic politics emphasizes governing, creating, and stewarding public resources, “the commons.” The theoretical framework, called “polycentric governance,” grew from research by Elinor Ostrom and a network of collaborators around the world, who found that strong citizen involvement in governance of commons like irrigation systems, fisheries, and forests, is essential to their survival. Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for this theory-building.
• Civic politics can be practiced in every setting. The concept of public work highlights co-creative elements in commons-building, institutional civic renewal, and workplaces as potential civic sites.
• Civic politics provides the foundation and motivation for developing the concept of citizen professionalism. Citizen professionalism reframes professional work not as the application of detached expertise but as deeply collaborative and relational, appreciative of many different ways of knowing, and affirming a common citizenship with others in the shared work of creating a democratic society. The concept has been widely taken up in family therapy, teaching, nursing, engineering, public affairs, environmentalism, city management, and other fields.

Questions for discussion

This moment of division, discouragement, and danger raises two questions for the field of Civic Studies: How should proponents (like ourselves) develop and expand Civic Studies as a field in these times? And how can we develop citizen professions who can help restore the work of citizens at the center of democracy?” Here are two ideas to consider:
• Should we create a Civic Studies Association?
• Should we explore the creation of an association possibly called Citizen Professionals for a Democratic Society?