Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement 2023 (AASC&U)

Boston Park Plaza Hotel | Boston, Massachusetts | May 31 - June 2

I arrived in Boston last Monday morning—early. The hotel, the Boston Park Plaza, was kind enough to let me check in around 10:00am when I first arrived, so I spent a good part of the day exploring Boston Common and the surrounding areas. On Tuesday night, a bunch of us from the 2023 Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement conference went to a Red Sox game at Fenway. The Sox lost, but they put up a terrific fight against the Cincinnati Reds, scoring 4 runs in the bottom of the ninth to bring the final score to within one run. Final score: Reds 9, Red Sox 8. If the Reds hadn’t hit that grand slam in the fourth inning, this outcome would have been quite different. But it was also cool to see a grand slam happen right in front of you in the oldest MLB ballpark still in use. It was like going back to the early 20th century for a baseball game.

Over the years, as I have started to do more and more work with AASC&U’s American Democracy Project and with democratic engagement more broadly in my research and teaching, CLDE has emerged as my favorite conference.

Part of this has to do, I think, with the fact that it’s a non-disciplinary (or inter-disciplinary) conference: academics tend to let their guard down a bit when they aren’t with other academics from their own discipline. There’s less of that chest-puffing and ego-maintenance and posturing that you see at, in my case, 4Cs (NCTE’s annual Conference on College Composition and Communication) or Rhetoric Society of America. Don’t get me wrong, both are great conferences, but CLDE is much more fun and mostly stress-free.

Here are a few highlights from the conference and my week in Boston.

“To Persuade or Not to Persuade? Determining Productive Forms of Rhetorical Engagement”

Bruce Bowles, Jr. | Associate Professor of English and Director of the University Writing Center at Texas A&M Central Texas | 8:30 to 9:20am | Tremont Room

As rhetoricians, we often assume (reflexively) that we always have to engage with bad faith arguments and debates—but do we? Bowles defines post-truth, noting that the concept itself has been the target of some criticism. Bowles suggests that the term “post-truth” implies that there is one universal truth that we can access. Moreover, it separates reason from emotion.

post-truth, adj.: relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping political debate or public opinion.

Bowles then talked about Hermagoras’s stasis theory: there are three main stases, or points of stasis (stopping) on which the argument can rest. They are

1. Fact or conjecture: my client did not do it!

2. Definition: what my client did does not fit the definition of the crime

3. Quality or value: although technically illegal, my client was in the right to have committed the act.

Here’s the thing: actual persuasion—truly changing someone’s mind—is often quite difficult to achieve. The component of necessity asks rhetors to truly contemplate whether rhetorical engagement will actually provide tangible benefits. Cui bono? Who or what benefits?

Bruce then gave a series of case studies and showed how he would typically approach these case studies with undergraduate students in the classroom. The first case study was on the phrase, “Let’s Go, Brandon!”