Cormac Russell - Rekindling Democracy: A Professionals Guide to Working in Citizen Space
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Rekindling Democracy: A Professionals Guide to Working in Citizen Space: summary, description and annotation
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Finally, a book that offers a practical yet well-researched guide for practitioners seeking to hone the way they show up in citizen space.
At a time when public trust in institutions is at its lowest, expectations of those institutions to make people well, knowledgeable, and secure are rapidly increasing. These expectations are unrealistic, causing disenchantment and disengagement among citizens and increasing levels of burnout among many professionals. Rekindling Democracy is not just a practical guide; it goes further in setting out a manifesto for a more equitable social contract to address these issues.
Rekindling Democracy argues convincingly thatindustrialized countries are suffering through a democratic inversion, where the doctor is assumed to be the primary producer of health, the teacher of education, the police officer of safety, and the politician of democracy. Through just the right blend of storytelling, research, and original ideas, Russell argues instead that in a functioning democracy the role of the professionals ought to be defined as that which happens after the important work of citizens is done. The primary role of the twenty-first-century practitioner therefore is not a deliverer of top-down services, but a precipitator of more active citizenship and community building.
At a time when public trust in institutions is at its lowest, expectations of those institutions to make people well, knowledgeable, and secure are rapidly increasing. These expectations are unrealistic, causing disenchantment and disengagement among citizens and increasing levels of burnout among many professionals. Rekindling Democracy is not just a practical guide; it goes further in setting out a manifesto for a more equitable social contract to address these issues.
Rekindling Democracy argues convincingly thatindustrialized countries are suffering through a democratic inversion, where the doctor is assumed to be the primary producer of health, the teacher of education, the police officer of safety, and the politician of democracy. Through just the right blend of storytelling, research, and original ideas, Russell argues instead that in a functioning democracy the role of the professionals ought to be defined as that which happens after the important work of citizens is done. The primary role of the twenty-first-century practitioner therefore is not a deliverer of top-down services, but a precipitator of more active citizenship and community building.
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Rekindling Democracy
A Professionals Guide to Working in Citizen Space
Cormac Russell
foreword by
John L. McKnight
John L. McKnight
afterword by
Julia Unwin
Julia Unwin
Rekindling Democracy
A Professionals Guide to Working in Citizen Space
Copyright 2020 Cormac Russell. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, W. th Ave., Suite , Eugene, OR 97401 .
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
W. th Ave., Suite
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-5363-6
hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-5364-3
ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-5365-0
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Names: Russell, Cormac, author. | McKnight, John L., 1931 , foreword. | Unwin, Julia, afterword.
Title: Rekindling democracy : a professionals guide to working in citizen space / Cormac Russell ; foreword by John L. McKnight ; afterword by Julia Unwin.
Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2020 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-7252-5363-6 ( paperback ) | isbn 978-1-7252-5364-3 ( hardcover ) | isbn 978-1-7252-5365-0 ( ebook )
Subjects: LCSH: Community development. | Community developmentPolitical aspects.
Classification: hn49.c6 r90 2020 (print) | hn49.c6 r90 (ebook)
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 05/29/20
In memory of my father, Michael Russell ( 1943 2018 )
Table of Contents
Preface
Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the Kings horses and all the Kings men
Couldnt put Humpty together again.
J ust as in the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty, in which all the Kings horses and all the Kings men couldnt put Humpty together again after his great fall, institutional systems and the professionals who work within them cant put us back together again. Hospitals, schools, and law courts all have important functions, but they do not have a monopoly on the production of health, wisdom, and justice. Having spent the last sixty years enthralled with all that institutions can do for our well-being, perhaps now, in the wake of the international banking crisis, the opioid crisis, our burgeoning healthcare systems, and the recurring scandals of so many of our residential care facilities from cradle to grave, we can see what exists in civic space beyond the limits of institutions. With this rekindled clarity, we can enjoy greater personal and collective freedom and more functional services. Getting there will require a new and better story than the hyper-rational, commodity-based one that currently dominates modern industrialized thought.
Effectively reweaving our human story necessarily begins by asking different questions and taking unconventional paths toward the future. Instead of asking, How can we get our agencies to add more value to, for, or with communities? we must ask, How can agencies create more space so that communities can produce the things they value?
The answer, at least in part, is to start with whats strong, not whats wrong, then to liberate whats strong to address whats wrong, and to make whats strong even stronger. This is a far cry from the usual institutional way of doing things.
The impulse to shift the question from what institutions can do to or for us (from the top down) to what we as citizens would like to begin to create (from the bottom up) is grounded in the belief that social progress is about the expansion of freedom, not the growth of services.
What might have happened if Humpty Dumpty had fallen backwardover the other side of the wall? This book in large part is about whats on the other side: the noninstitutional, community side. On the community sidewith some searchingwe can hope to find the nest that hatches and the associational life that catches the humanness within us and between us all, and from there get better at being human together, since to be human is to be social. We can hope to once again see like a community. This book is also centrally about how professionals can work more effectively with citizens in civic space. A citizen is not someone sitting crouched over kindling, waiting for someone else to light their fire, so this is a guide for professionals interested in working with citizens so that they can rekindle democracy for themselves and each other, from the bottom up and the sidelines in.
Decentering, Not Demeaning
Throughout this book, I argue that citizens must be at the center of any authentic and powerful democratic response to our current socioeconomic challenges and that we ourselves must be the vitalizing starting point for a more sustaining future for all life. My secondary aim for this book is to decenter, not to demean, institutions and professionals, since this is the only way to restore citizenship and community to the center of democracy.
As I wrote this book, I regularly found myself looking back somewhat pensively on my early days as a helper working for the Irish Health Board in residential child care. I recognized that the top-down, rescuing impulses I critique and argue for decentering in the pages that follow were part of how I showed upalong with a know-it-all attitude and unquestioned certaintiesin the lives of the people I served. Socrates was famed for questioning such certainties; his epigram I know only that I do not know is among the best-known philosophical dictums. Im afraid it did not form part of my repertoire in those days.
It took me quite some time before I began to question my certainties, a process that involved setting aside the maps I had constructed or learned and instead getting my whole self into the territory. By maps I mean the heady assumptions I had made, or received from others, about someone or somewhere, or those people. And by getting into the territory I mean sitting with and getting to know a community or visiting a place with real curiosity and humility, and by invitation. I have come to understand that one of the consequences of spending too much time in any large institution, even as a professional, is that you too can become institutionalized and disconnected from life on the ground just as much as the people who are traditionally thought of as clients.
The reason institutions can achieve impact at scale is that they depersonalize their objectives (the underlying rationale is an institution should never rely on any one person) and they elementalize (specializations and siloed departments dominate). This is also the trouble with institutions; institutions dont care, because they cant. People care. As professionals from this depersonalized, specialist, unsituated position we can come to know everything in general and very little in particular. The trouble with that is that citizen space is filled with people who know everything in particular and are not all that interested in our generalizations. And so often institutions and communities, professionals and citizens are ships passing in the night.
Repeatedly, across my professional life, when I have truly listened, I have heard people say they want interdependence within communities that celebrate them as gifted people with something to contribute to the well-being of those communities. In other words, they want a life, not a service. Like Humpty Dumpty they were not seeking more of the kings horses and men; they were yearning for the hatchers and the catchers in a life of their own choosing. In the early days of my career, I found myself on the wrong side of the Humpty Dumpty wallwithout a ladder. My journey since then, with many co-conspirators for company, has been a mix of prospecting for ladders, traversing the narrow perimeter that divides the institutional worlds and community life, and increasingly seeking out the hatchers and the catchers in home places and communities around the world.
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