Our working group seeks to bring “historical perspective and interdisciplinary edge” to the efforts of cultural institutions in promoting civic discourse. As the facilitators have stated, “our communities” face a range of complex, trenchant and divisive issues and our potential roles within cultural institutions—as “experts,” facilitators, and/or cultural insiders—demand creativity, commitment, and reflexivity.

I approach this area and mode of inquiry from the perspective a historian with nearly two decades of experience in the National Park Service. Like many cultural heritage institutions, the NPS has explored and emphasized an iterative and discursive process of “civic engagement” which we define as “a continuous, dynamic conversation with the public on many levels that reinforces public commitment to the preservation of heritage resources, both cultural and natural, and strengthens public understanding of the full meaning and contemporary relevance of these resources” (NPS Director’s Order #75A on Civic Engagement and Public Involvement, 2003/2007). Our engagement models work to ensure the relevance of NPS resources and programs, as well as “to ensure NPS responsiveness to diverse public viewpoints, values, and concerns.” In turn, these modes of engagement are intended to further our agency’s conservation mission by encouraging “the public to enjoy the parks and participate in programs in appropriate, sustainable ways.” I suspect that many institutions approach civic discourse as a strategy to increase the “relevancy” of organizational goals, resources, and operations with “nontraditional” or “underserved” audiences. Obviously, the language that we employ in describing our challenges and commitments reveals and underscores enduring conceptual biases and asymmetries of power and, perhaps more importantly, intimates the ambivalence engendered in and by an agent of the state in promoting civic discourse as a path toward equity change.

While I acknowledge that state authority is embedded and implicit in my agency’s mission, I want to explore how our mission and our position (including our national reach) may provide an unusual opportunity to shape and practice reimagined and reconstituted habits of citizenship. My path of inquiry treads along the familiar idea of parks or cultural institutions as “third places” that provide common spaces and opportunities to encounter and build community, but also grapples with the desirability and possibility of a reimagined “consensus” within the polis without a recapitulation of fixed, historical relations of domination and acquiescence. I think that Danielle Allen’s Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education offers an important and useful philosophical foundation for reorienting inquiry that directly harnesses interrogations of existing hierarchies of voice, expertise, and opinion to purposeful habits of reciprocity and to the project of building trust. “Consensus,” in this sense, is not imagined or coercive unanimity, but rather a habitual mode or relation fashioned through interaction and, ultimately, the purposeful work of decision-making.

In the practical work of the group, my interests revolve around how museums and networks of culture heritage sites can foster sustained encounters that help to cultivate reconstituted habits of citizenship. By definition, a habit is formed through repetition. Maxims cited by proponents of civic discourse, including myself, assert the efficacy of dialogue and engaging across categories of difference in fostering empathy, encouraging diversity and collaboration, and effecting cultural changes towards more inclusive environments. While the immediate objectives of dialogue-based programming may differ, the ultimate strategic goals position knowledge and content within lived experience and societal contexts. How have museums analyzed and characterized these societal contexts? How are our definitions of “social justice” and “advocacy” in conversation with sociological research about the erosion of community and the impacts of new media and communications technology? How have civic discourse events and initiatives contributed to community-bridging? How do museums—including state institutions—contribute to these habits of citizenship and rejuvenate democratic practice? Are these habits formed through sustained local relationships? Through repeated practice or experience in settings and relations that extend into national contexts? How have we measure and evaluate these larger social and political outcomes and aspirations? How can civic discourse orient and sustain habits of citizenry and democratic practice toward what Allen describes as “wholeness: the “development of a people that is not one or homogeneous, but [rather] a coherent, integrated body” in which citizens learn to negotiate relationships of loss and reciprocity? What has been the work of civic discourse? What can it be?

~ Christine Arato, National Park Service

Discussion

1 comment
  1. Thanks for this, Christine. The issue that you bring up about the ambivalent or conflicted nature of the state’s role in producing social justice or equitable change has been on my mind a lot lately. Is this only or primarily a concern within state agencies, or also at all institutions that receive funding from governmental sources? In any case, the perennial question: can we have change from within? I so look forward to talking more about this and learning from your fascinating career.

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