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February 27, 2003
civic work
I participated in an interesting conference call with members of the
.
Although I'm a bit embarrassed because I haven't done any work on it,
I'm listed as the co-editor of a proposed book that would describe recent
experiments in real-world citizens' deliberations. The Consortium, meanwhile,
is committed to holding a conference for researchers and practitioners
during 2003. The purpose of today's call was to explore the possibility
of using the conference to create the book—by inviting authors to
present preliminary drafts of their chapters. There are potential advantages
to collaboration for both the Consortium and those of us who are working
on the book.
I also met with the two students and two professors who are conducting a project on journalism, funded by the Kettering Foundation (I am Principal Investigator). Their project is to create a website with material drawn from political theory that's of practical value for working journalists. The more fundamental goal is to explore ways that political theory could be more useful to journalism, and vice versa. They have decided to focus for now on two pressing issues: the role of the press in covering a war; and arguments in favor of conscription. They are finding more good political theory relevant to the second question, but more news coverage of the first.
Posted by peterlevine at February 27, 2003 04:02 PM