The symbol of our modern times could easily be the shout emoji. The public discourse surrounding just about every subject--politics, the economy or which film got robbed at the Oscars ceremony—seems to have devolved into an echo chamber of yelling and permanently divided factions. A lot of talking, to be sure, and not nearly enough listening.
It’s a development that hasn’t gone unnoticed by Katherine Cramer, a professor of political science and the Natalie C. Holton Chair of Letters & Science. Cramer first began to explore the divide while conducting research for her seminal 2016 book, The Politics of Resentment, in which she toured communities in rural Wisconsin, collecting the reactions of citizens to sweeping developments in state politics.
Last year, she was part of a group that decided to do something to bridge the gap on a local and national level. She co-founded the Local Voices Network (LVN), a national effort fronted by the MIT-based startup Cortico, to give underserved voices in communities across the country a chance to speak and be heard. LVN initially launched in Wisconsin and New York, and has since expanded to Massachusetts, Alabama and California.
“My whole career, I've been basically inviting myself into other people's conversations,” says Cramer. “And I almost always find that when you're with a group of people who have given themselves the time to sit down with one another and talk, even if they are strangers, they typically figure out how to do it in a very civil fashion.”
Civility and open-mindedness are the essence of the LVN experience. An LVN facilitator guides the discussion, in which the participants raise topics of concern to them. So far, topics have ranged from climate change, economics and religion to discussions about local police and fire services. Invited participants gather around a “digital hearth,” a high-end recording device that captures their comments and archives them for others to hear. The second piece of the hearth is a speaker that allows the group facilitator to play comments from previous conversations to add additional dimension to the experience.
“The focus is really on getting people to share their own lived experience or their own firsthand stories of how they've experienced challenges with affordable housing, for example, as opposed to encouraging people to come in with their arguments and their bullet points ready to go,” explains Cramer. “We hope it's different than a lot of the discourse that we get.”
In the project’s first year, that’s very much been the case. One conversation centered on the deaf community taught participants and listeners that things in our lives we take for granted, like drive-through fast-food restaurants, are essentially unusable for deaf individuals. Another session collected multiple perspectives on the thorny role of police officers in public schools.
In one conversation, a participant mentioned how struck he was by another participant sharing the story of the event that spurred her to become an environmentalist.
The storyteller was his wife.
“People often reflect at the end of the conversation about how nice it felt to have the time to listen to one another and hear the stories that they may not have ever heard from their friends or even family members,” says Cramer.
In the states and communities where it’s active, the network has partnered with local media outlets, giving journalists access to the comments and perspectives of participants. In this sense, Cramer says it’s fulfilling another level of civil service. That’s particularly poignant in Wisconsin, a state with a deep progressive tradition and a strong independent streak.
“Having studied it up close, I think you can say there's something about the political culture here. There’s a range of opinions and a lot of movement. That lends itself to people in their own communities, figuring out how to get things done and how to connect with one another,” Cramer says.
Cramer began her role with LVN as a community organizer, but her role has shifted to conversation analyst, making sense of what’s being heard. As the project enters its second year, it’s in full expansion mode: A new network is set to launch in Sacramento, California, and Cramer hopes LVN can host ten times as many conversations as it did in 2019.
And, of course, more than a few of them are likely to revolve around the 2020 presidential election. As Cramer puts it, LVN’s stance is that all the conversations are about the election, because the candidates are, ideally, discussing the issues that matter to people’s lives. But even if the conversations do tilt toward the political, they won’t be about pushing any particular ideology.
Says Cramer: “It isn't about persuasion. The hope is not that when people have this opportunity to hear each other's stories, that they change their minds. It's that they see each other as human beings and better understand themselves.”