Days of Dialogue: Ground Rules

“Our initiative is grounded in intersectional understandings of social injustice and the empowering principles of participatory democracy (see Bachrach Botwinick 1992) and deliberative dialogue (see Nagda 2006).

Our guiding principles and goals are as follows:

1) We want to provide a space for people within our college community to come together, collectively discuss issues, engage with other community members, and develop new forms of action to impact institutions.

2) We recognize that dialogues are especially useful when they realize the impacts of social and racial inequities. We aim to ground these conversations in evidence and theory on racism and racial injustice. Dialogues that focus on inequity can produce greater empathy between groups, reduce intergroup bias and prejudice, and help people form coalitions across social differences. The key is centering the context of inequity and its manifestation in lived experiences and systems.

3) The idea of deliberation or deliberative democracy is deeply to community dialogues. Deliberative democracy focuses on discussions about issues. It provides a space for people to talk together, seek to understand each other, share what they think and why, and feel heard and hear others. Deliberation, as a process, adds legitimacy to decisions because everyone has a voice.

4) Participatory democracy focuses on action and engagement. It seeks to change people and institutions. It offers a path for democratization by helping people have more profound and broader participation in decision making. Through participation, people gain a sense of empowerment and knowledge to use in their civic engagement. It allows people to figure out their group and individual interests by having an opportunity to express their concerns and work to make relevant changes.

5) Community dialogues about these issues can help us all build leadership and community change skills by assisting people in coming up with new solutions to problems and new understandings.

6) Finally, we emphasize inclusion. Inclusion means being active rather than passive to ensure that all the people who are impacted by an issue are involved in deliberation and participation around that issue. We will focus our outreach and programming on countering "passive exclusions" – barriers related to people's self-confidence, time, resources, and language that can prevent people from showing up and getting involved (Young 1999).