
Talking about Race - Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference
Katherine Walsh(Author)
University of Chicago Press
Published on 15. May 2007
Book
Paperback/Softback
318 pages
978-0-226-86907-0 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
"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"More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago
United States
Publishing group
The University of Chicago Press
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 160 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
528 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-226-86907-0 (9780226869070)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
09/2008
1st Edition
University of Chicago Press
€46.79
Available for download
Person
Katherine Cramer Walsh is associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and the author of Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life, also published by the University of Chicago Press.