Difference-Driven Inquiry: A Working Theory of Local Public Deliberation

Abstract

Local publics open a distinctively generative space for deliberation, one that can actually use difference, based on race, status, or discourse, as a resource—but only if such marginalized perspectives can gain standing and be heard. For difference to gain a voice may depend on a discourse that can delay consensus, acknowledge conflict, and provoke a difference-driven inquiry. Drawing on a study of a deliberative process triggered by issues of diversity within a university, this essay sketches a working theory of community engagement supported by the rhetorical scaffold of a Community Think Tank. The essay explores the theoretical potential of conflict in local publics while asking how rhetorical activists and educators might support a difference-driven deliberation in practice.

Keywords:

• community
• deliberation
• difference
• inquiry
• publics

Acknowledgments

Good readers raise good arguments. Elenore Long, Eli Goldblatt, David Coogan, and Phyllis Ryder weighed in with kindness from the start. The insightful advice of Susan Jarratt and the exceptionally generous engagement of the remarkable, anonymous reviewers have made a difference I deeply appreciate.

Notes

¹ Heifetz, who directs the Leadership Education Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School, replaces “great man” theories of leadership with what is in fact a highly relational and fundamentally rhetorical practice. For Heifetz leaders engage citizens and organizations in the difficult work of negotiating change, together. The nuanced case studies that support his model of adaptive work document a process of facing and even embracing conflict as part of what he could call “mobilizing people” to change (20).

² In the deeply agonistic, power-charged struggles typically explored in communication studies, controversy actively thwarts the return to a rational deliberative process. Whether this sustained disruption is seen as failed public engagement or hailed as an ongoing struggle for dominance, scholars agree on the transformational scope of this process (Cramer; Goodnight; Phillips). In many ways it is an extension of the fact, as many speech communication studies observe, that the deliberative process of “doing democracy” is itself a process riddled with dilemmas—minority voices can be co-opted, competence must be learned, and conflict is as problematic as it is necessary. See Christopher Karpowitz and Jane Mansbridge; Mansbridge; and Karen Tracy for provocative, richly detailed ethnographic accounts, paralleled by the empirical studies reviewed by Cass R. Sunstein and Michael X. Delli Carpini et al. James Fishkin and Peter Laslett’s Debating Deliberative Democracy offers competing frames for this academic controversy, while John Gastil and Peter Levine’s Handbook documents the complex outcomes of sustained deliberative projects.

³ I draw here on Janet Atwill’s argument, which highlights how this “art of discourse” saw knowledge in terms of “production not product; intervention and articulation, rather than representation” shaped by its affinity for transgressive and transformative work (7). Elenore Long’s study of the place of technē in university-based community engagement also notes a dis-ease with its strategic forms of intervention in contrast to the academic norms of description.

⁴ The various think tanks described here were developed with graduate and undergraduate students in seminars that combined extensive reading in rhetoric and community literacy with developing and testing a transferrable repertoire of rhetorical strategies for supporting inquiry. A more detailed discussion of these practices, a guide for designing a think tank, the published Findings, and studies of some outcomes can be found on the Carnegie Mellon Community Think Tank site, http://www.cmu.edu/thinktank.

⁵ The seedbed of this deliberative practice was a community–university collaboration, called the Community Literacy Center, committed to giving urban teenagers a public voice in their neighborhood, schools, and city. Their texts, on topics from risk and respect to school policy, documented and dramatized an issue from normally silenced perspectives and were performed at a culminating teen-led Community Conversation. In 2001, the problems that America’s new “welfare to work reform” was creating for both women and employers led us to devise a Community Think Tank which brought these underprepared employees, human resource (HR) managers, researchers, service providers, and community advocates to the table to compare their (often competing) interpretations of problem scenarios and to collaboratively imagine rival options for action (Flower, “Intercultural”). As the practice of this Community Think Tank evolved, it has been used to create local publics for various purposes: to give Nursing Aides and food service workers a new voice in their workplaces, to help an African American union initiate an internal dialogue on breaking glass ceilings, and in other cases, to support inquiry in educational groups around issues ranging from disability and diversity, to the culture of stress. The local publics and their discourse norms differ considerably, but the need to give a public voice to difference remains. (For the Findings from these inquiries see http://www.cmu.edu/thinktank/docs.html).

⁶ For instance, it is rarely enough for marginalized speakers to merely “have a voice,” but theorizing the best path to achieving standing is a matter of debate. Our humanist and educational tradition would valorize a discursive competence based on critical rationality, logic and objectivity, uncompromised by intervention. Revisionist rhetorical scholars on the other hand would argue that both Aristotle and the Sophists are pointing us to a more inclusive interventional understanding of how the socially engaged arts of rhetoric work in context (Atwill; Jarratt, Rereading). Yet say we take the latter path; should our end-in-view be the achievement of consensus or the social process of controversy that can foster and articulate dissensus? Do we choose, as Jack Selzer puts it, “Concord and Controversy,” the impulse to division or consubstantiation (Burke’s terms), the conflicting over the irenic (24)?

⁷ This value placed on consensual discourse can of course be equally apparent in the private planning sessions of groups devoted to pure advocacy. What matters is not the group but the advantages and limitations these discursive alternatives offer.

⁸ Unlike professional, expert, or technical knowledge (born of experimentation and verification), local “ordinary knowledge” draws on common sense, casual empiricism, or thoughtful speculation, grounded in a normative understanding of the meaning of events and relationships (Fischer, Citizens 170–79). Public discussion based on this social knowledge has the power to subject individual experience and policy options to what rhetoric calls doxa—to “the set of assumptions, values, and beliefs that inform positions and claims” and, when imaginatively reconstructed by a speaker, even challenge and transform doxa itself (Ritivoi 58–59).

⁹ When we enter an intercultural inquiry visibly marked by differences of race, class, or socioeconomic status, we are prepared to expect significant conflicts in perspective and silent situated knowledge (Flower, Community 159–60). Within an apparently homogeneous community, however, the rhetorical challenge can be to disrupt our comfort with projecting “what others think” by giving a demanding presence to less obvious kinds of difference.

¹⁰ In comparing these different ways of going public, it is important to recognize that different forms of activism are probably most productive in synergy. At the same time our university project focused on students’ local struggle to manage financial burdens, the Occupy Wall Street movement was raising a media controversy labeled “student loan fury.” Although motivated by a similar agenda (“We need to convert private pain into a public issue, not relegate it to the shadows, in shame” as one commentator put it [McKenna]), Occupy was using rhetorical practices suited to building an adversarial constituency within a large media public.

¹¹ I draw the contrast here between the insights offered by situated knowledge and the interpretations provided by available social frames to highlight their implications for institutional activity. To zero in on the machinery of exclusion and the way individuals in particular are represented, Robert Asen’s study of the welfare debates offers a related approach. Our perceptions, or what he calls our “collective imagining” of Others who “‘appear’ in debates from which they are physically absent” (“Imagining” 347) draw on “a constellation of shared assumptions, values, perceptions, and beliefs” (351) that circulate in public discourse. And as in the case of women on welfare, controversy can force an active engagement with this collective imagination as “advocates explicitly call upon their audiences to rethink relations with one another” (351).

¹² Roberts-Miller would make a distinction between persuasive agonism and a more doggedly contentious polemical agonism, both of which ideally require an openness to change. Nevertheless, my argument would highlight the problematic, in-practice reality of agonism’s interactional style—in which critical thinking is indeed achieved but through no-holds-barred attacks on the arguments of one’s opponents. “For agonism, it is conflict all the way down” (130).

¹³ In Michael Warner’s studies of larger, text-based publics, circulation and uptake are themselves the agentive forces that call a public into being. Local publics help us see how this impersonal process is also influenced by the rhetor’s art.

¹⁴ For instance, the next fall we were able to circulate a student-written UpDate newsletter which documented (i.e., publically celebrated) the subsequent work of the Enrollment group and re-circulated excerpts from the Findings.