The Duke Center for Civic Engagement: Vision and Initiatives

As the snow of last week, still on the ground, orients us to a new season, the Duke Center for Civic Engagement completes its first semester in its new form. In Feb. 2010, following the Klein-Wells report on civic engagement at Duke, Provost Lange and Dean Nowicki invited me to be the inaugural faculty director of the DCCE, a position that I would hold along with my faculty duties in the Department of Religion. The new DCCE, distinct from DukeEngage beginning this fall, is a university-wide center whose goal is to help sustain and enhance a culture of civic engagement among faculty, students and staff at Duke. It has been a time of intense study for me as I arrive at an understanding of the diverse efforts in civic engagement at Duke and begin to develop a vision for how we can build on these efforts to transform our sense of the civic, our approaches to it, and consequently, our abilities to better the world in which we live.

As I posted on the “The Loom & The Wheel” blog (DukeEngage-Hyderabad), the halftone image from the world of art helps visualize civic engagement. The knowledge we gather and the steps we take to engage are like the many dots in a halftone, dots whose sizes and relationships to each other make it possible to see the image. Civic engagement also is about dots, how we perceive them, how we arrange them, and ultimately, how we connect them. Stepping back—physically from the halftone and figuratively from civic action (to reflect)—enhances our capacity to discern. When we connect the dots that are outside in the world with dots inside us, engagement begins, and we can arrive at a vision of the civic.

The re-conceptualized DCCE’s key initiatives, programming, website and ethos are being built around the core premise that civic engagement is rooted in how we know, how we share, how we act—and most of all, how we connect these three. One important manifestation of this premise is the Duke civicXchange, which held its first meeting on Dec. 3 in Smith Warehouse. The civicXchange is a voluntary collective open to all students, faculty and staff at Duke, as well as civically-minded non-Duke collaborators, who share an interest in issues relating to civic engagement. Members of the civicXchange interact through self-proposed Civic Forums that are issue-focused (Democracy, Collaboration, Youth, Child Education, Durham-Urban Issues, Durham-Schools, Art & Activism, etc). The Civic Forums will meet both online and also face-to-face (through a process that the DCCE will enable) where members will propose ideas, listen, question, discuss issues and identify opportunities and collaborators. These active cross-discipline conversations will be instrumental for the DCCE to help translate debate at Duke into partnership-based social change initiatives. As a whole, the civicXchange itself will meet over lunch twice a semester, beginning Spring 2011, where Civic Forums will share ideas, concerns and proposals.

Fostering the overall integration of curricular learning and engagement—through coursework and research projects—will be a crucial aspect of the DCCE’s mission. Toward this, the DCCE will help generate visual Knowledge-Maps of Engagement, drawing primarily on the expertise of academic advisors and faculty across the university, and input from civicXchange participants. These Knowledge Maps will suggest tangible course pathways through which a student can imaginatively plan a civic engagement driven curriculum in an area of interest.

A first major step was accomplished over the summer, as the Office of Undergraduate Education and the DCCE worked to create a web portal—civic.duke.edu—that now serves as a hub of information about Duke’s efforts in civic engagement. The website features courses, programs, opportunities and news relevant to civic engagement. This site will continue to grow and complement the DCCE’s own website (shaped by the meta-themes of “know,” “reflect,” “collaborate” and “transform”), which is being developed for launch in the spring.

Civic Engagement Studios are part of a DCCE signature initiative coming from the recognition that serious collaboration is one of the defining principles of civic engagement. DCCE will fund four to five studios which will necessarily include faculty, staff, undergraduate/graduate students and a non-Duke collaborator to work for an academic year on a topic of social change. In another initiative, the DCCE will host a monthly lunch-conversation called Civic Thursdays, which will bring individuals together in public conversation to critically reflect on and explore ‘civil society at Duke.’ DCCE’s three-part Co-Being Series will explore through speaker-panels, performance and art, the meanings and manifestations of co-existence in its many possibilities. Thus, in all its activities, the Center will make a deliberate effort to engage faculty, students, staff, alumni and non-Duke collaborators.

This vision for the Duke Center for Civic Engagement comes from the recognition that civic engagement itself is always work-in-progress. Also, civic engagement is never optional (as in “I don’t do that” and or “I finished doing that”) if we see civic engagement as the understanding and the cultivation of a sense of co-being in the world. To agree to co-being requires us to cultivate practices of engagement in everyday life.

Leela Prasad is the faculty director for Duke’s Civic Engagement Center and an associate professor of Ethics and South Asian Studies in the religion department.