Download or read book Science Civic Life written by Kris Morrissey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2017. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

Download or read book Diminished Democracy written by Theda Skocpol and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2013-06-14 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pundits and social observers have voiced alarm each year as fewer Americans involve themselves in voluntary groups that meet regularly. Thousands of nonprofit groups have been launched in recent times, but most are run by professionals who lobby Congress or deliver social services to clients. What will happen to U.S. democracy if participatory groups and social movements wither, while civic involvement becomes one more occupation rather than every citizens right and duty? In Diminished Democracy, Theda Skocpol shows that this decline in public involvement has not always been the case in this countryand how, by understanding the causes of this change, we might reverse it.

Download or read book What Should We Do written by Peter Levine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Active and responsible citizens form or join and sustain functional groups in which they ask the fundamental civic question: What should we do? In these groups, they characteristically face problems of collective action (such as free-riding), of discourse (e.g., propaganda and ideology), and of exclusion. Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of political economy demonstrate that collective-action problems can be solved and suggest "design principles" that increase the odds of success. Jürgen Habermas argues that people can deliberate; experiments with deliberative democracy offer insights about what makes these conversations go well. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. offer models of nonviolent social movements that indicate how to address problems of exclusion. Good civic action requires insights from these three traditions of theory and practice. This book concludes with a synthesis of the three traditions that also addresses the challenge of scale: how to preserve intentional, ethical, collective action when millions or billions of people are involved. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-6 and the current Black Lives Matter movement provide detailed examples. This book also proposes an alternative approach to political theory that focuses on individuals in voluntary groups rather than governments or whole societies"--

Download or read book Engaging Young People in Civic Life written by James Youniss and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The myth of generations of disengaged youth has been shattered by increases in youth turnout in the 2004, 2006, and 2008 primaries. Young Americans are responsive to effective outreach efforts, and this collection addresses how to best provide opportunities for enhancing civic learning and forming lasting civic identities. The thirteen original essays are based on research in schools and in settings beyond the schoolyard where civic life is experienced. One focus is on programs for those schools in poor communities that tend to overlook civic education. Another chapter reports on how two city governments--Hampton, Virginia, and San Francisco--have invited youth to participate on boards and in agencies. A cluster of chapters focuses on the civic education programs in Canada and Western Europe, where, as in the United States, immigration and income inequality raise challenges to civic life.

Download or read book We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For written by Peter Levine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In September 2011, two leading civic engagement advocacy organizations headed, respectively, by Robert Putnam and Peter Levine released a joint report showing that a region's level of civic engagement was a strong predictor of its ability to recover from the Great Recession. This finding confirms what advocates of civic engagement have long hypothesized: that strengthening the networks between government and civil society and increasing citizen participation results in better government and better community outcomes. However, citizens concerned about the economic crisis need more than just deliberation or community organizing alone to achieve these outcomes. What they need, according to Peter Levine, is a movement devoted to civic renewal. Deliberative democracy-the idea that true democratic legitimacy derives from open, inclusive discussion and dialogue rather than simple voting-has become an extremely influential concept in the last two decades. In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, Peter Levine contends that effective deliberative democracy depends upon effective community advocacy. Deliberation, he shows, is most valuable when talk and debate are integrated into a community's everyday life. To illustrate how it works, Levine draws lessons from both community organizing and developmental psychology, and uses examples of successful efforts from communities across America as well as fledgling democracies in Africa and Eastern Europe. By engaging in this type of civic work, American citizens can meaningfully contribute to civic renewal, which, in turn, will address serious social problems that cannot be fixed in any other way"--

Download or read book The Professions and Civic Life written by Gary J. Schmitt and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-06-10 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professions are institutions which, through their small size, self-governing elements, and sense of social mission, can assist in maintaining a sound civic culture. As mediating institutions in our democratic society that are neither entirely birthed by the state nor are entirely private, the individual professions—such as the legal and education professions, journalism, economics, architecture, or the military—arguably present practical avenues through which to teach civic behavior and to restore Americans’ broken trust. This volume on the professions and civic life undertakes a unique and timely examination of twelve individual professions to see how each affects the character of American citizenship and the civic culture of the nation through their practices and ethos. Among the questions each essay in the volume addresses are: What is distinctive—or not—about the specific profession as it came to be practiced in the United States? Given the specialized knowledge, training, and sometimes licensing of a profession, what do the professions perceive to be their role in promoting the larger common good? How can we bring professionals’ expert knowledge to bear on social problems in an open and deliberative way? Is the ethic of a particular profession as it understands itself today at odds with the American conception of self-government and a healthy civic life? Through analysis of these questions, each chapter presents a rich treatment of how the twelve longstanding professions of political science, teaching, the law, the military, economics, medicine, journalism, literature, science, architecture, music, and history help support and challenge the general public’s civic behavior in general and their attachment to the American regime in particular.

Download or read book Civic Life Online written by W. Lance Bennett and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 10 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship of participation in online communities to civic and political engagement. Young people today have grown up living substantial portions of their lives online, seeking entertainment, social relationships, and a place to express themselves. It is clear that participation in online communities is important for many young people, but less clear how this translates into civic or political engagement. This volume examines the relationship of online action and real-world politics. The contributors discuss not only how online networks might inspire conventional political participation but also how creative uses of digital technologies are expanding the boundaries of politics and public issues. Do protests in gaming communities, music file sharing, or fan petitioning of music companies constitute political behavior? Do the communication skills and patterns of action developed in these online activities transfer to such offline realms as voting and public protests? Civic Life Online describes the many forms of civic life online that could predict a generation's political behavior. Contributors Marina Umaschi Bers, Stephen Coleman, Jennifer Earl, Kirsten Foot, Peter Levine, Kathryn C. Montgomery, Kate Raynes-Goldie, Howard Rheingold, Allen Schussman, Luke Walker, Michael Xenos

Download or read book Why We Vote written by David E. Campbell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-16 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do more people vote--or get involved in other civic and political activities--in some communities than in others? Why We Vote demonstrates that our communities shape our civic and political engagement, and that schools are especially significant communities for fostering strong civic norms. Much of the research on political participation has found that levels of participation are higher in diverse communities where issues important to voters are hotly contested. In this well-argued book, David Campbell finds support for this view, but also shows that homogenous communities often have very high levels of civic participation despite a lack of political conflict. Campbell maintains that this sense of civic duty springs not only from one's current social environment, but also from one's early influences. The degree to which people feel a sense of civic obligation stems, in part, from their adolescent experience. Being raised and thus socialized in a community with strong civic norms leads people to be civically engaged in adulthood. Campbell demonstrates how the civic norms within one's high school impact individuals' civic involvement--even a decade and a half after those individuals have graduated. Efforts within America's high schools to enhance young people's sense of civic responsibility could have a participatory payoff in years to come, the book concludes; thus schools would do well to focus more attention on building civic norms among their students.

Download or read book Science and Civic Life in the Italian Renaissance written by Eugenio Garin and published by Peter Smith Publisher. This book was released on 1969 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A New Engagement written by Cliff Zukin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-18 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In searching for answers as to why young people differ vastly from their parents and grandparents when it comes to turning out the vote, A New Engagement challenges the conventional wisdom that today's youth is plagued by a severe case of political apathy. In order to understand the current nature of citizen engagement, it is critical to separate political from civic engagement. Using the results from an original set of surveys and the authors' own primary research, they conclude that while older citizens participate by voting, young people engage by volunteering and being active in their communities.

Download or read book Making Volunteers written by Nina Eliasoph and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-28 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inside look at how community service organizations really work Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that empowerment programs aim to teach. With short-term funding and a dizzy mix of mandates from multiple sponsors, community programs develop a complex web of intimacy, governance, and civic life. Eliasoph describes the at-risk youth served by such programs, the college-bound volunteers who hope to feel selfless inspiration and plump up their resumés, and what happens when the two groups are expected to bond instantly through short-term projects. She looks at adult "plug-in" volunteers who, working in after-school programs and limited by time, hope to become like beloved aunties to youth. Eliasoph indicates that adult volunteers can provide grassroots support but they can also undermine the family-like warmth created by paid organizers. Exploring contradictions between the democratic rhetoric of empowerment programs and the bureaucratic hurdles that volunteers learn to navigate, the book demonstrates that empowerment projects work best with less precarious funding, more careful planning, and mandatory training, reflection, and long-term commitments from volunteers. Based on participant research inside civic and community organizations, Making Volunteers illustrates what these programs can and cannot achieve, and how to make them more effective.

Download or read book Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life written by Ashutosh Varshney and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What kinds of civic ties between different ethnic communities can contain, or even prevent, ethnic violence? This book draws on new research on Hindu-Muslim conflict in India to address this important question. Ashutosh Varshney examines three pairs of Indian cities—one city in each pair with a history of communal violence, the other with a history of relative communal harmony—to discern why violence between Hindus and Muslims occurs in some situations but not others. His findings will be of strong interest to scholars, politicians, and policymakers of South Asia, but the implications of his study have theoretical and practical relevance for a broad range of multiethnic societies in other areas of the world as well. The book focuses on the networks of civic engagement that bring Hindu and Muslim urban communities together. Strong associational forms of civic engagement, such as integrated business organizations, trade unions, political parties, and professional associations, are able to control outbreaks of ethnic violence, Varshney shows. Vigorous and communally integrated associational life can serve as an agent of peace by restraining those, including powerful politicians, who would polarize Hindus and Muslims along communal lines.

Download or read book Why Place Matters written by Wilfred M. McClay and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary American society, with its emphasis on mobility and economic progress, all too often loses sight of the importance of a sense of “place” and community. Appreciating place is essential for building the strong local communities that cultivate civic engagement, public leadership, and many of the other goods that contribute to a flourishing human life. Do we, in losing our places, lose the crucial basis for healthy and resilient individual identity, and for the cultivation of public virtues? For one can’t be a citizen without being a citizen of some place in particular; one isn’t a citizen of a motel. And if these dangers are real and present ones, are there ways that intelligent public policy can begin to address them constructively, by means of reasonable and democratic innovations that are likely to attract wide public support? Why Place Matters takes these concerns seriously, and its contributors seek to discover how, given the American people as they are, and American economic and social life as it now exists—and not as those things can be imagined to be in some utopian scheme—we can find means of fostering a richer and more sustaining way of life. The book is an anthology of essays exploring the contemporary problems of place and placelessness in American society. The book includes contributions from distinguished scholars and writers such as poet Dana Gioia (former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, urbanist Witold Rybczynski, architect Philip Bess, essayists Christine Rosen and Ari Schulman, philosopher Roger Scruton, transportation planner Gary Toth, and historians Russell Jacoby and Joseph Amato.

Download or read book Civic Media written by Eric Gordon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examinations of civic engagement in digital culture—the technologies, designs, and practices that support connection through common purpose in civic, political, and social life. Countless people around the world harness the affordances of digital media to enable democratic participation, coordinate disaster relief, campaign for policy change, and strengthen local advocacy groups. The world watched as activists used social media to organize protests during the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution. Many governmental and community organizations changed their mission and function as they adopted new digital tools and practices. This book examines the use of “civic media”—the technologies, designs, and practices that support connection through common purpose in civic, political, and social life. Scholars from a range of disciplines and practitioners from a variety of organizations offer analyses and case studies that explore the theory and practice of civic media. The contributors set out the conceptual context for the intersection of civic and media; examine the pressure to innovate and the sustainability of innovation; explore play as a template for resistance; look at civic education; discuss media-enabled activism in communities; and consider methods and funding for civic media research. The case studies that round out each section range from a “debt resistance” movement to government service delivery ratings to the “It Gets Better” campaign aimed at combating suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth. The book offers a valuable interdisciplinary dialogue on the challenges and opportunities of the increasingly influential space of civic media.

Download or read book The Multifaceted Nature of Civic Participation written by Ram A. Cnaan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civic participation is an ideal concept in most democratic societies. In this review, Cnaan and Park document how key writings are limited in scope and are either nonprofit, political science or environmental studies oriented. Cnaan and Park conclude with a call for future research of civic participation to be both comprehensive and sensitive.

Download or read book Holding Fast written by James A. McCann and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2020-10-08 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fight over immigration reform and immigrants’ rights in the U.S. has been marked by sharp swings in both public sentiment and official enforcement. In 2006, millions of Latino immigrants joined protests for immigration reform. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a policy granting work permits and protection from deportation to undocumented immigrants who entered the country before age 16, was enacted in 2012, despite a sharp increase in deportations during the Bush and Obama administrations. The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump prompted a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment which threatened DACA and other progressive immigration policies. In Holding Fast, political scientists James McCann and Michael Jones-Correa investigate whether and how these recent shifts have affected political attitudes and civic participation among Latino immigrants. ​ Holding Fast draws largely from a yearlong survey of Latino immigrants, including both citizens and noncitizens, conducted before and after the 2016 election. The survey gauges immigrants’ attitudes about the direction of the country and the emotional underpinnings of their political involvement. While survey respondents expressed pessimism about the direction of the United States following the 2016 election, there was no evidence of their withdrawal from civic life. Instead, immigrants demonstrated remarkable resilience in their political engagement, and their ties to America remained robust. McCann and Jones-Correa examine Latino immigrants’ trust in government as well as their economic concerns and fears surrounding possible deportations of family members and friends. They find that Latino immigrants who were concerned about the likelihood of deportation were more likely to express a lack of trust in government. Concerns about personal finances were less salient. Disenchantment with the U.S. government did not differ based on citizenship status, length of stay in America, or residence in immigrant-friendly states. Foreign-born Latinos who are naturalized citizens shared similar sentiments to those with fewer political rights, and immigrants in California, for example, express views similar to those in Texas. Addressing the potential influence immigrant voters may wield in in the coming election, the authors point to signs that the turnout rate for naturalized Latino immigrant may be higher than that for Latinos born in the United States. The authors further underscore the importance of the parties' platforms and policies, noting the still-tenuous nature of Latino immigrants’ affiliations with the Democratic Party. Holding Fast outlines the complex political situation in which Latino immigrants find themselves today. Despite well-founded feelings of anger, fear, and skepticism, in general they maintain an abiding faith in the promise of American democracy. This book provides a comprehensive account of Latino immigrants’ political opinions and a nuanced, thoughtful outlook on the future of Latino civic participation. It will be an important contribution to scholarly work on civic engagement and immigrant integration.

Download or read book Science and Civic Life written by Kris Morrissey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Editor's Note -- Introduction: Exhibits are Not Enough -- Science in the Obama Administration -- Engaging the Public in Public Policy -- Mind the Gap: Science Museums as Sources of Civic Innovation -- Science and Technology Policy and Ethics: What Role Should Science Museums Play? -- Historical Perspective on Participatory Approaches in Science and Technology -- Making Peace with Plutonium -- Addressing Climate Change in the Adirondacks -- Book Review -- Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits -- A Report from the National Research Council -- Event Review -- World Science Festival, New York City -- Resources for Science & Civic Life