Trench Democracy: Conversations on Participatory Democracy

We’re happy to announce a new long-running series with Albert Dzur. His dispatches from the front lines of civics will be available in full here and excerpts will run on the Boston Review website.

Read Albert Dzur’s new piece in the Boston Review on civic practice, introducing the series:

Bringing lay people together to make justice, education, public health, and public safety—when done as a routine part of the normal social environment—helps fill in the erosion produced by the destructuring of public life. It is accomplished in part by repairing our frayed participatory infrastructure—the traditional town meetings, public hearings, jury trials, citizen oversight committees, for example—but also by remodeling this and creating new civic spaces. Democratic professionals in schools, public health clinics, and prisons who share their load-bearing work are innovators who are expanding, not just conserving, our neglected democratic inheritance.

Editorial Board Member Peter Levine discusses the project here.

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