Talking about Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference (Studies in Communication, Media, and Public Opinion) - Softcover

Walsh, Katherine Cramer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226869075 ISBN 13: 9780226869070

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2007

Synopsis

It is a perennial question: how should Americans deal with racial and ethnic diversity? More than 400 communities across the country have attempted to answer it by organizing discussions among diverse volunteers in an attempt to improve race relations. In Talking about Race, Katherine Cramer Walsh takes an eye-opening look at this strategy to reveal the reasons behind the method and the effects it has in the cities and towns that undertake it.

With extensive observations of community dialogues, interviews with the discussants, and sophisticated analysis of national data, Walsh shows that while meeting organizers usually aim to establish common ground, participants tend to leave their discussions with a heightened awareness of differences in perspective and experience. Drawing readers into these intense conversations between ordinary Americans working to deal with diversity and figure out the meaning of citizenship in our society, she challenges many preconceptions about intergroup relations and organized public talk. Finally disputing the conventional wisdom that unity is the only way forward, Walsh prescribes a practical politics of difference that compels us to reassess the place of face-to-face discussion in civic life and the critical role of conflict in deliberative democracy.

About this title

About the Author:

Katherine Cramer Walsh is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she is also director of the Morgridge Center for Public Service and an affiliate faculty member in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the LaFollette School of Public Affairs, the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, and the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies.

Review:

"An important and original work, Talking about Race provides a unique and critical contribution to research on deliberation. It is a major empirical study of inter-personal communication and is of great importance not only to specialists in political deliberation but also to the wider community of scholars interested in political communication." - Diana Owen, Georgetown University"

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0226869075
• ISBN 13: 9780226869070
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344