Over the past decade, there have been countless examples of the breakdown of civil discourse – the ability to develop mutual respect and identify common ground to communicate across differences – in American society. Heightened perhaps by the 2016 U.S. presidential election, these examples include physical and verbal attacks, destruction of public and private property, and general violations of human and civil rights. This breakdown runs counter to our ideals of civic engagement, civil discourse and peaceful protest.
This past July, five undergraduate student leaders and a few staff members from the University of Washington (UW) boarded a plane to London, England. Their shared mission was to observe and research public and civil debates and to bring those lessons back to Seattle to design and implement civil discourse activities at the UW over the next three-to-five years.
The Civil Discourse Project
This project, known as the Civil Discourse Project, is an innovative collaboration between the Brotherhood Initiative (BI) and the Sisterhood Initiative (SI) at the UW. It was conceived to provide a transformative learning experience for students of color and to contribute to larger efforts at the UW to foster civil dialogue. The purpose of the project is to develop a framework about civil discourse – one that includes emotional regulation, compassion, kindness, respectful disagreement and the prevention of physical and verbal attacks. That framework can then be adopted and/or adapted by research and practitioner communities for their own context.
The first phase of the Civil Discourse Project was to travel to London to consider a few key questions – What is civil discourse? What does it look and feel like? Who does it include? London was identified as the prime location to set the stage for this project given that it is a multicultural city and considering Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park is an international example of where a racially and ethnically diverse group of people are able to engage in a space set up for civil discourse. Since 1872, Speaker’s Corner has been a place to engage in solo, dyadic, and group conversation and debates about wide-ranging and important topics of the day. The London portion of the project -made possible by funding from the Office of Global Affairs’ Global Innovation Fund – was therefore designed to observe free speech in action at Speakers’ Corner, to enable the students to step outside of their cultural norms, to think meaningfully about their own identities and to challenge their own expectations about civil discourse.
The group that traveled to London consisted of two Brotherhood Initiative students and three Sisterhood Initiative students representing a range of years of experience at the UW as well as majors from Law, Societies & Justice to Informatics. The students were selected for the project to provide different perspectives from across campus. Before they departed, they engaged in community building to solidify their bond before, during and after their trip across the Atlantic. They also read Monica Guzman’s book, I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, to learn more about how to build bridges between communities with different ideas and how to speak across differences – not just for an election cycle, but for their everyday lives.
Visiting St. Paul's Cathedral
Flying in to London
The Civil Discourse Project is an opportunity for students to identify nuance within their own communities and to challenge some of their generalizations around how civil discourse looks and how it should happen. It’s an opportunity to disrupt their thinking.
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Speakers’ Corner
While at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, the students took note of the body language, tone and physical surroundings of the speakers. The students were surprised to see the amount of filming that was happening for social media. They noticed there was almost an incentive for the speakers to say things that would get them likes, clicks or follows. Many of the speakers focused on religious issues or global politics. This caught the students off guard because they expected to hear more topics about issues local to England. Given the current digital age, they recognized that Speakers’ Corner is no longer a stage just for London, but a platform to project messages around the world. The students were struck by not only the impact of social media, but by the ages of the speakers who were exchanging ideas and the role power plays in shaping free speech.
Speakers’ Corner was the most impactful part of the trip for me. Before I went to London, I expected to see one person standing on a stool and everyone taking turns to speak. However, when I saw it all in practice, it was very much not that. There were no directions on who should talk. Speakers were not engaging with each other.
Exploring London
While Speakers’ Corner was the highlight of the trip, the Civil Discourse Project group also participated in three guided tours – walking up to six or seven hours a day – to explore formal and informal versions of civil discourse and to delve into the cultural background and history of London. They first took a two-hour walking tour of Westminster to discover historical spaces of civil discourse. They explored major landmarks, hidden public squares, political salons, and Winston Churchill’s war rooms. Then, they took a guided tour of Parliament, where they were able to walk through the historic halls.
Their third and final tour was a two-hour walking tour of one of London’s most culturally rich neighborhoods, Brixton. The tour focused on the importance of immigration, street art and food for East End residents. The students learned more about the history of communities of color across London as well as their ability and inability to engage in civil discourse. This final tour challenged the narratives the group heard from the previous two tours.
Mural by artist Dreph celebrating the Brixton Uprising of 1981
Gathering for a meal in London
Exploring London together
Going to London was an amazing experience. I’ve always been curious about research. I didn’t know much about civil discourse before this project but I wanted to learn more about it and different ways to define it.
From Research to Practice
During their time in London, the students were encouraged to identify themselves as researchers in their own lives. They were asked to start each morning with the following questions in mind – What does civil discourse look like? Who gets to engage? – and to end each evening with a written reflection. The students’ observations became more nuanced and perceptive throughout their time in London – observing graffiti on a wall and examining what that is saying from overhearing passing conversations on the street. By the end of the trip, students gained a sense of confidence and were even talking with people on the London tube to learn more about their own experiences with civil discourse in their personal and professional lives.
London made me think a lot about how to have important conversations across contentious issues and how to create an accessible structure for marginalized communities who are less empowered to be included in these kinds of conversations. I want to be intentional about how to create spaces for civil discourse.
Now that the group is back in Seattle, their plan is to take the data they gathered to inform how they plan to implement civil discourse activities at the UW. They are looking forward to reinvesting what they’ve learned in the campus community. Over the course of this academic year, the students will respond to written prompts to reflect on their tour of London and to make sense of the data they collected. They will conduct a survey of first year Brotherhood Initiative and Sisterhood Initiative students asking questions from “how prepared are you to engage in civil discourse on campus?” to “who is the biggest influence and what are your expectations around civil discourse?” They will also host a conversation in the Spring 2025 quarter to mindfully engage students at the UW in a way that feels right to them. It will be an opportunity to learn about different perspectives, to learn about other opinions and to wrestle with their own opinions.
Given the upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election, it is critical now more than ever that institutions of higher education serve as spaces to understand and address matters that are central to the public, including uplifting principles of democracy and civic engagement. The timing of the Civil Discourse Project could not be better, especially given the intense rhetoric happening around communities of color and identity politics, considering that it is empowering students to guide and fuel conversations that bring communities together.
2024 U.S. Presidential Election
Fall on the UW campus
Originally published October 2024