Of Rockets and Humanities

Speaking a year ago at the 50 Years of Public Computing at UI symposium (April 15, 2010), Professor Marc Snir noted that technologists at times have been uninterested in the outcomes of their inventions: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department.” Of Community Informatics (CI), Snir noted: “CI cares where the IT [information technology] rockets come down. That concern is an integral part of IT research.” Snir went on to argue that IT can, is and must be a force for good, contributing to the democratization of knowledge, challenging power relations in the process. Technologies change society, he noted, with changes in the way we process information. Handmade items now become precious; likewise, “brain thought” will be rarer and more valuable than machine thought.

Universities are information organizations, as Snir put it. IT should be affecting them, but teaching, research and organization are remarkably the same these days. A fundamental assumption is that a professor is in a position of authority, but knowledge workers (such as university professors) will be increasingly obsolete. We are not really able to see what is needed, but much education happens outside of the classroom. Prof. Richard J. Light’s study at Harvard, The College Experience: Blueprint for Success, showed that collaborative environments help all of us integrate knowledge, and that teaching by doing contributes to success. (See also, Making the Most of College: Students Speak their Minds, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)

Other points Snir made:

· Information flows are lateral, meaning decision processes are less hierarchical

· Virtual ad-hoc processes will continuously change geographically distributed organizations

· Data is cheap; a key skill is knowing how to find or create data

· Self-service is cheaper

· Online education needs to increase to optimize education when and where needed

· Citizen and community science needs assessment measures

I came across these notes while cleaning my office, and they resonate with another talk I attended recently, that by David Theo Goldberg, “The Afterlife of the Humanities.” With Cathy N. Davidson, Goldberg is author of The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (The MIT Press, 2010). Goldberg spoke of state-located institutions rather than state-supported institutions these days. Asking “what are universities for and for whom?” Goldberg noted that they used to help transform class structures. He argued that in some ways the blogosphere has sidelined universities as a place for public comment. Then he listed a number of venues where exciting exchanges are taking place, at DIY universities:

· P2PU (partially funded by Mozilla)

· Singularity University

· Free/Slow University of Warsaw

· Center for Possible Studies

· Public Schools Brussels

· Copenhagen Free University

· University of the People

· EduFactory

· Factory of Ideas

And I would add our own local School for Designing a Society.

Goldberg went on to mention Chris Newfield’s blog, “Remaking the University”  in his outline of the usual defensive arguments in favor of the humanities:

-they are intrinsically valuable (Stanley Fish is associated with this idea)

-they make economic sense by providing transferable skills and supporting science

-they emphasize civics and make good citizens (Martha Nussbaum argues this, especially in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities)

-they can dramatically shape the public sphere by creating counterpublics

Goldberg spoke of the “greater humanities” and the condition of “living in a critical condition.” He suggested that it’s time to take the networks of ideas as networks seriously, offering some examples:

-Making Publics

-Poor Theory manifesto suggests revisions and remixes, as in compost

-Public Reason, a blog for political philosophers

Then he asked, “what is the university we are for?” He argued for the capacity to make wise judgments together, in conversation. Humanities are consequential: they speak truth in relation to power, as both trouble-shooter and trouble-maker. They provide much more than negative critiques; they serve as compasses and help imagine what is possible. Goldberg proposed dramatically reconceived humanities that are germane to our working lives, with institutional humanities disappearing.

Responsive Architecture

I had the good fortune to hear Tristan Sterk talk the other night in Champaign. He’s teaching now at the Art Institute of Chicago, and came down at the invitation of Therese Tierney, an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the U of I. Tristan is principal of the Office of Robotic Architectural Media and the Bureau for Responsive Architecture (ORAMBRA). His background in thermal performance provides a solid foundation, as it were, for his architectural experiments, kind of like a technology start-up company, he said, with the goal to produce scalable systems. He described his approach as “anti-architecture,” or what architecture would look like if we didn’t let form drive the project. Other phrases he used: open, egalitarian, new vernacular, built from available technologies, bottom-up. He encouraged us to give up authorship. I found myself thinking of the wonderful work of Michael Rakowitz, whose PARAsite project collaborated with homeless individuals to create inflatable structures with the vented air in cities.

Tristan has prototyped a Prairie House, an “iPod to live in” that adapts and changes to human and environmental conditions. He aims to integrate environmental controls with the spatial system, changing the nature of space itself. This house has a tensegrity system (Tristan showed cool videos of models in motion) with a skin that changes in response to various conditions. Other variables that the Prairie House takes into account: softness, rigidity, color, permeability, volume, shape, insulation levels. Videos are on Tristan’s website featuring him in action on a recent Intelligent Infrastructure panel.

Yona Friedman informs some of Tristan’s thinking, and he read an excerpt from L’Architecture mobile (I think.) This from a chapter he (Tristan) has written for a book due out soon called Persistent Modelling, edited by Phil Ayres (Routledge, 2012.) The key concept that excited me was a series of systems that would be actively given over to occupants, who could manipulate and change these systems to meet their needs. This architecture would be built from a few standard pieces, but used in many ways, with performance driving form. David Hays asked about the threshold cost of these structures…at what point does the expense outweigh the benefits?

Regional Relationships

The collaborative artist team, Regional Relationships (RR), has just launched its first edition! Matthew Friday, the first artist commissioned by RR, has been working in southern Ohio with flooded mines. He writes of “interlocking networks of abandoned mines” that number about 12,000. A bacteria has colonized the flooded underground areas and, as part of their digestive process, they “free” the acidic sulfur in the leftover coal, thus leading to acid mine drainage. “[S]everal thousand gallons of toxic sulfur hydroxide every week” flow through the ecosystem. Together with an environmental engineer from Ohio University, Dr. Guy Riefler, Matthew produced a neutralized tube of paint from the mine runoff; it’s ochre-colored. He provided a brush, a pen, and a tube of pigment, plus a sheet of paper, and invited participants to diagram their own relationships with nature/culture, what Matthew describes as “entangled collectives that make up the world [and] cannot be separated into neat categories….” To spark creation of diagrams, Matthew posed these questions: “Where does your water come from? What systems contribute to its production? What histories are folded into current form? What futures are being produced by the way we make use of it?”

My graduate seminar in Architecture happened to be discussing R. Buckminster Fuller last week, and Bucky’s ideas about Spaceship Earth. It seemed like as good a time as any to create a diagram about water in central Illinois, riffing off of the Buckminster Fuller Institute‘s Challenge, “an annual international design Challenge awarding $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.” We listed various aspects of the water cycle and watched the video about Jennifer Monson’s Mahomet Aquifer project that is linked from the blog. Students Matthew Goyak, Deven Gibbs, Jieyoung Lee, Shellie Halkyard, and Todd Mackinson created this wonderful illustration on March 17, 2011. The brown tint is the pigment from Matthew Friday.

Notes on “Archiving Memory in the Age of Digital Technologies”

I am still playing conference catch-up. Between September 23 and October 3, 2010, I went to two conferences, the Imagining America conference in Seattle, and the Society for the History of Technology conference in Tacoma.

For now, I just want to share my notes on the keynote talk on September 24, 2010 by Diana Taylor at Imagining America. Taylor is an amazing academic and activist known for her book, The Archive and the Repertoire, and her work with the Hemispheric Institute of the Americas, the website and archive of which is based at New York University. Her talk was titled, “Save As…Archiving Memory in the Age of Digital Technologies.” She read her paper very fast, so my notes are sketchy. But it was a great talk; it’s lousy (for her!) she had a bad cold. The reason to post this now (SIX months later!) is that Imagining America just released a print version of this talk as a Foreseeable Futures pamphlet.

She began by referencing Clay Shirky‘s writings, and saying that access and preservation are not “co-terminous” with our time. What we know is radically altered by how we know it. The usual interpretation: body as ephemeral and archive as knowable and fixed.

Repertoire: collective thinking, knowing in place vs. Archive: but these are not static binaries

Digital databases combine “archives” with life. This phenomenon doesn’t usher in the age of the archive, or a new version of repertoire, but instead a mixed aspect that draws on and alters both.

The digital and the virtual are not interchangeable.

The new digital era is obsessed with that which is archived, conflated with “save,” “upload,” etc.

Collection, library, inventory, museum

Archive as fetish—murky understanding of what is saved, what is forgotten, and the political connotations of that

Place/thing/practice->each relies on other for its authority

Digital technology seems to hold promise that people can produce and control information (though surveillance also an issue.)

Taylor in her book noted the abuse of archive by constructors of past.

What is gained or lost by using the word “archive” to describe upload?

Hemispheric Institute (HI) archive—trilingual HI digital video library (HIDVL); postcolonial archive (Digital Iron Mountain)

Also HI has commissioned work; also born digital, ie, Amnezac

Politics of the copy (save as)—return the original to owner

HIDVL—process of selection and validation does reproduce elitism, unlike YouTube: initially went after “classics” of performance in video that were in danger of being damaged (c. 2000)

Skeuamorphs like stickies, trash can, on computer can help users adapt.

Place/thing/practice change online, seeming “nowhereness” of digital archive; multi-sitedness of web

Time Magazine’s online archive has “erased” its own traces (ie, ads)…anti-archival

Anxiety about loss and forgetting feeds fascination with archive

Who owns the digital? How do we “act” online? Re: betw digital and repertoire?

Data and digits—ways of experiencing ourselves shifting

“making” vs “adding” friends on Facebook

Taylor wrote about online collaborative teaching: “Translating Performance” Profession 2000 (MLA, 2002)

Reboot, Rebuild

On Saturday, October 30, about fifteen people who had gathered in Chicago for the Digital Excellence conference came together to brainstorm next steps for the community technology movement, with Michael Maranda doing the heavy lifting of organizing a space and guiding the discussion. Besides Michael, the group included Max Gail of LAP.org, Antwuan Wallace of the Association for Community Networking, Boston activist Peter Miller , Pierre Clark of the Chicago Digital Access Alliance, Taran Rampersad of ThinkDrop, Marlene Archer, Stan Pokras from Philadelphia, Kami Griffiths from TechSoup in San Francisco, Sally Duros, a former Sun-Times reporter, now writing for various online publications, futurist Jim Lew, Gerry Gleason and myself. Thanks so much to Michael for introducing me to these folks and the correct spelling of their names!

After a morning of lively discussion, we ate a long and leisurely lunch, continuing the conversations and getting better acquainted. While some folks had to catch airplanes, others returned to discuss how to move forward. Michael suggested using bettermeans.com until something else emerged. While I enjoyed meeting all these folks, they have been in the trenches and at the barricades for much longer than I, so I listened and asked elementary questions.

Digital Excellence 2010

In late October, I went to Chicago to join folks from across the country for DexCon 2010, the First Chicago Neighborhood Digital Excellence Conference, a convening of activists and others interested in community technology in Chicago. The major organizers were Pierre Clark, Thom Clark and Michael Maranda. It was a full day at DePaul University downtown, providing a chance for people to come together around enduring and shared concerns. I have mostly highlighted links and organizations that I think are useful to know about.

Thom Clark, president of the Community Media Workshop, started out the day by recalling a Community Media Summit about ten years ago in Boston, and CivicNet, about a dozen years ago in Lawndale in Chicago, which were also efforts to network communities. It continues to be a goal of many of these folks to jumpstart a distributed community network, reviving work by CTCNet, and Association for Community Networking (AFCN). (I heard conflicting and ambiguous references to the status of these organizations.)

Next, I went to one of the parallel workshops on Digitally Empowered Youth. Rose Mabwa, of the Illinois Consortium of Neighborhood Networks–about forty or so technology centers that leverage resources to serve their constituencies, especially youth–reported on a pilot collaboration during 2010 with the Museum of Science and Industry and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist David Delgado skyped in to tell us about his work with STEM education and the Mars project. (STEM education is Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, which, obviously, leaves out a swath of learning styles and areas, but that is another story.) So Delgado and Mabwa discussed their hands-on work with about 30 youth related to the question, “What would it be like to live on Mars in the future?” Participants were asked to create a “society” from the ground up, and solve problems such as food and water access, and addressing radiation and weather issues. Delgado has been involved with this educational effort across the country, working with students, teachers, and web-based curricula. Then Salome Chasnoff of Beyondmedia spoke. She is also co-chair of Chicago Youth Voices Network. Beyondmedia is now ten years old, and focuses on using media arts to enable youth and women to express themselves and social justice. Programs include Girls Action Media, Women in Prison, and Q’d In Media (for LGBTQ youth). Chasnoff focused on Chain of Change, which was a recent effort by youth to end violence, using videos, blogging, and other means. They are currently raising funds for a Chain of Change van that would be a mobile production studio. Another youth campaign was “HIV/AIDS: It’s Viral,” which included a youth activism guide and a blog as well. Denise Zaccardi, founder and executive director of Community TV Network, spoke next. They offer drop-in times for folks to come in and create video. Sandee Kastrul then spoke about i.c. stars, a program for future technology leaders, that begins with an intensive four-month internship, followed by two years of practical experience, and more support for the subsequent three years. Interns must have a GED or high school diploma and six months of work experience. The participants create a business plan for a venture capitalist; submit to a competition for a Fortune 500 company; and build a large-scale application for a non-profit. In 2005, they started a program called Bridges, which partners with city colleges and is merit-based. i.c. stars promotes a shift from consumers to innovators and a “bigger than you” sensibility. The interns receive $600/month as a stipend (because the days are long and another job is not viable), and during their practica they are paid $12-20 an hour, depending on the job. All of these groups are constantly raising money, writing grants, and providing “fee for service” work to support their missions.

Next up, I went to the Building a Solid CTC/PCC workshop. This panel featured Vince McCaskill talking about Sunshine Gospel Ministries, which focuses on mercy, discipleship, and justice in their organization. They manage a number of community technology centers (CTCs), keep them open during the day, and use Network Initiative for Teaching Entrepreneurship to enhance youth skills. They also provide basic computer training. Patty Fisher, of Knowledge Hook-up, on the far southeast side of Chicago, serves a majority of Latino/a people, many of whom have an education level of 5-8 grades, and incomes between $15-$30,000. Fisher’s group partners with Olive Harvey City College, churches, politicians, and schools to provide an array of trainings in a very under-resourced area. Their local library, Vodak-Eastside Library, used to just have four computers, but now has up to 16. Similarly the overcrowded elementary school (1500 kids!) had only 25 computers in 2006, but now has more (but probably not enough.) Ms. Fisher highly recommended materials on gcflearnfree.org (hosted by Goodwill Industries), Beehive (run by One Economy) and Learn the Net, for all sorts of information of use to underserved populations. Maritza Chavez then spoke about her work at Erie Neighborhood House. She is involved with the Technology Education Services Program. She began as a student in the program and has thrived in the setting, now as a leader.

Lunch was packed with conversation and interaction, prior to an awards ceremony. I got a little acquainted with the keynote speaker, Nicol Turner-Lee, with whom I shared a table. She is vice-president and director of the new Media and Technology Institute of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, DC. Awards were given: to Carl Davidson, a long-time Chicago-based activist who was inspired by civil rights activist Bob Moses, and who had recently returned from Mondragon, Spain, a worker cooperative federation; Julia Stasch, Vice President of Human and Community Development at the MacArthur Foundation; and Representative Constance Howard. Dr. Turner-Lee spoke animatedly about broadband deployment and its relevance to digital literacy and excellence. She highly recommended the Charles Benton Foundation’s headlines and blog, “Digital Beat.”

The after-lunch discussion with Matthew Guilford, Director of the City of Chicago’s Office of Technology and Innovation; Drew Clark, Executive Director of the Partnership for a Connected Illinois; Pierre Clark, Co-founder of the Chicago Digital Access Alliance; Licia Knight, Digital Impact Officer of One Economy Corporation; and Don Samuelson, Principal of DSSA Strategies, was effectively moderated by Thom Clark. Pierre Clark referred us to the Intelligent Community Forum. Ms. Knight spoke about youth as technology ambassadors, and One Economy’s partnerships with AT&T and Verizon. Mr. Samuelson spoke about his work with seniors and My Way Village. Seniors are fast adopting communications technologies, and he pointed to Connected Living as a tool. There seemed to be a fair number of competing agendas in the room, but the overall message was: “think big, start small, scale fast.”

Finally, I attended a paenl on Mashable Frontiers: Open Data, Open Gov. Justin Massa of the Metro Chicago Information Center and Movesmart.org faciliated discussion among Jonathan Eyler-Werve of Global Integrity; Rishi Desai of Smart Communities Humboldt Park; and Peter Haas of the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT). There was a lot of talk about data quality and data availability, but of interest to me was the CNT’s H+T Affordability Index, which helps people find affordable housing with good transportation access, and Abogo, which helps make transportation costs transparent. Eyler-Werve, who wrote The User’s Guide to Measuring Corruption, stressed three things: 1. data sources need to be pinned down; 2. don’t put one word labels on datasets (so you don’t know the context); and 3. if you have bad data, get more of it. Rishi Desai works with 20-30 organizations in Humboldt Park, all of which need data to make their cases, and often good, helpful data is non-existent. Government websites tend to be user UNfriendly, so the government should share its data and let civic and private sectors innovate with it. They discussed the MetroPulse web data system by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and the Chicago Community Trust’s Regional Indicators Project as worth watching after it goes live November 17. There was also talk about data management for non-profits, with Indaba Systems as an example.

Thanks to all for a stimulating day!

The Containerization of the World

Two weeks ago I toured the Port of Tacoma in Washington State during the annual conference of the Society for the History of Technology. Tacoma is one of the top ten container ports in the United States, but it also handles specialized cargo and cars. Commencement Bay, which is a deep-water harbor in southern Puget Sound, provides an ideal site for Pacific Rim trade. The Port covers 2725 acres, with five waterways, including the channelized Puyallup River. According to the PR, “more than 70 percent of all waterborne commerce shipped from the lower 48 states to Alaska crosses Port of Tacoma docks.” The stevedores and longshoremen are all computer geeks now, tracking each container through complex systems and ships, ensuring just-in-time delivery as much as possible, to minimize storage and transportation costs. There is clearly a lot going on here, even in the economic downturn. The shipping and railroad buff in me was delighted; otherwise I felt stunned at the literal size of global capitalism in action.

“Meating” in WordPress

I know a lot of people who blog. Lately, I have been blogging on other websites, which I think is a delightful way of connecting. Kasalina Nabakooza is a photographer and a recent graduate in Comparative Literature from New York University. She lives in Brooklyn and began an exchange with me via email. Her website includes wonderful portraits of people on the street, in addition to this “interview” that we did.

Today, in time for Hallowe’en, a blog post I wrote on Lady Gaga’s meat dress went live on the blog of University of Minnesota Press. A version of the meat dress by Jana Sterbak, c. 1987, in the photo at left is part of the Walker Art Collection in Minneapolis. It is called “Vanitas.” Thanks to Maggie Sattler for inviting me to blog for the Press.

BEE: Built Environment Education

I have been asked about integrating aspects of architectural history into K-12 curricula, which is something I did on a very small scale when my kids were in elementary school in the 1990s. I never went so far as to align the activities we did with state standards, but that’s because I worked closely with teachers.

First, I looked at what the American Institute of Architects (AIA) had done with their Built Environment Education (BEE) curriculum. Searching for it now in 2010, it seems that others have taken it up, because there are a lot of hits online. But Alan Sandler, with whom I corresponded, wrote an article in Art Education (v. 42, no. 5, pp. 13-16) in 1989 called, “Learning by Design: The AIA Elementary and Secondary Education Program.” Illustrated with drawings of buildings by children, the article lays out the steps that the AIA took to integrate principles about the built environment into established curriculum, using teacher training, activity development, and networking. Locally, in Champaign, Gary Olsen and Michele Olsen and their office created the Architeacher program, which still seems to be a going concern.

With young children, awareness and appreciation of the natural and built environments and their interactions, as well as visual thinking and observation skills are probably as, if not more important, than any mastery of content.

For my daughter’s class, we began by measuring the classroom. We then had to scale down the measurements in order to draw the plan, and we made symbols for doors and windows. These steps involve vocabulary building, math and drawing. We talked about how one classroom connected to the hallway, and all the other parts of the building.

I had taken photographs of details of buildings near the elementary school where my daughter went. These were mostly pictures of windows, roof details, foundation stones, porch columns, and doors, which I mounted on poster board and laminated. Groups of about five children and an adult then went on a treasure hunt to match the photos with the buildings around the school, following a map that I gave to each adult leader. Each group headed in a different direction to find their own “treasures.”

There are lots of other activities that relate to buildings and history and connect to basic skills for elementary-level students:

• The game of “Blockhead” helps kids learn about shapes, loads and balance

• Children can find shapes, lines, textures, colors and patterns in pictures of buildings

• School children can make rubbings of different building materials

• Older children can make bridges and learn about spans and load-bearing structures

• “Sidewalk superintendents” can learn a lot by visiting a construction site

• Similarly, students can visit an historic house, an architect’s or contractor’s office

Leal School teachers Colleen Brodie and Nancy Coombs published two books with their classes: Children, Architecture, and History: A Child’s Walking Tour Guide of Urbana (1989-90) and then A Child’s Guide of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1990-91). They include drawings and information about buildings on campus and in Urbana.

Nowadays there are a great many more books available (and easily searchable!), but here are some of the ones I collected, obviously in no particular order:

Forrest Wilson, What It Feels Like to be a Building (1995), ages 4-8

Wilson, The Joy of Building: Restoring the Connection between Builder and Architect (Van Nostrand Reinhold Co, 1979), older kids

Most of David Macaulay’s books http://www.davidmacaulay.com/

Fagg, Sington, How They Built Long Ago

MacGregor, Skyscrapers: A Project Book

Goldreich, What Can She Be? An Architect

Haldane, Faces on Places: About Gargoyles

Balthasar Korab, Archabet: An Architectural Alphabet Postcard Book (Preservation Press, 1992)

Diane Madex, Architects Make Zigzags: Looking at Architecture from A to Z (Wiley, 1986)

Katharine Jones Carter, Houses (1982)

Harriet Langsam Sobol, Pete’s House (1978)

Cobb/Strejan, Skyscraper Going Up

Carter Harman, A Skyscraper Goes Up

Ingoglia, The Big Book of Real Skyscrapers

Jane D’Alelio, I Know that Building: Discovering Architecture with Activities and Games (National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1989)

Paolo Donati (illus) and Philip Wilkinson, Amazing Buildings (Dorling Kindersley, 1993)

Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-sections (Knopf, 1992)

The Center for Children’s Books, one of the research centers at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Illinois, has many resources available to help expand these ideas.

Civility and Flying

I went to Washington, DC, to serve on an all-day review for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in early August. The idea was to fly in one evening and fly out the next, given that DC in August is not really a comfortable time of year and I was about to go on vacation. Jim Leach, the director of the NEH, launched an initiative this year focusing on civility and democracy.  The previous head of NEH, Bruce Cole, conducted an interview with Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, on this very topic as well. It was published in Humanities in 2005.  President Barack Obama addressed the issue of civility and democracy in his May 2010 commencement address at the Univeristy of Michigan: “[T]he practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship.” I even got a little pin that says “Civility” on it, once I got to the NEH panel convening.

When my flight to DC was substantially delayed in Chicago, some people became quite uncivil. One man, who claimed to be a surgeon, had a really unpleasant meltdown. He harangued us all about his crucial engagement at National Institute of Health the next day and how he was going to sue American. Lots of very loud swearing, name-calling and sweaty, hostile body language. Remarkably unhealthy.

I had just finished the chapter in The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming, about using verbal judo to diffuse hostile encounters, but I was too tired to even attempt something with this guy. The idea of verbal judo, according to George Thompson who developed it, is that one uses “the principle of judo itself, using the energy of others to master situations.” Verbal judo is “a set of communication principles and tactics that enable the user to generate cooperation and gain voluntary compliance in others under stressful conditions.” (Thompson and Jenkins 1993, 89) I must say, it sounds like it takes practice. But if we are to re-learn civility in stressful and varied situations, we will need early and frequent lessons about strategies like verbal judo. Civility in a multicultural democracy is not just going to happen; in that sense, I wish Mr. Leary’s initiative every success, in bridging cultures and instilling civility, provided civility means respectful striving for justice and patient negotiation of difference.

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