Frontiers II begins at the Tufts University School of Medicine, 145 Harrison Ave., Boston MA, on Thursday, July 19 at 5 pm and ends at 1 pm on Saturday, July 21, 2012. Register here .

This year, Frontiers will revolve around a diverse set of rehearsed 10–minute talks on aspects of civic studies and democratic renewal, each followed by small–group discussions. NCoC is proud to announce our very own Kristen Cambell as a speaker. NCoC is partnering with the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University, The Deliberative Democracy Consortium, and The Democracy Imperative in bringing you this event. It is a public conference that follows the Institute of Civic Studies, a small seminar that is now closed for 2012. It is the fourth in a series of annual conferences, the second to be entitled ”Frontiers of Democracy.”

The following is a guest blog from Peter Levine, Director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, and Research Director of Tufts University's Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service.

This will be the fourth annual summer conference that convenes practitioners, advocates, students, and scholars of democracy and citizenship at Tufts University to explore connections among their work.

The conference assumes that ”citizens” are people who want to make their own communities better––or at least prevent them from getting worse. That definition goes back to the oath of ancient Athenian citizens, who swore, ”I will not leave my country less when I die, but greater and better.”

If you want to make a country (or any community) ”greater and better,” you need knowledge of three kinds. You must understand facts: what is going on in the world around you and what causes things to change. You must know values so that you can tell the difference between better and worse (or right and wrong, or just and unjust). Finally, you must know effective strategies.

Facts, values, and strategies should guide your own personal actions. It's no use proposing that the United States government should do something if you have no leverage over the government beyond your own vote, which is just one in 100 million. At the same time, it's inadequate to behave well as a private individual. You can't just ”be the change”; you should try to change the world around you. Only in groups of modest size do individuals gain leverage over larger institutions. Thus your knowledge of facts, values, and strategies should emphasize small–scale groups and communities, also known as ”civil society.”

Mainstream scholarship tends not to produce enough knowledge that combines facts, values, and strategies relevant to civil society. Too often, facts are unmoored from values and strategies, and scholars are mainly interested in the macro scale of whole governments, markets, and societies. But of course there are many important exceptions. We teach a form of thinking useful to citizens in the annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies that precedes the Frontiers Conference. The scholars and reflective practitioners who gather in groups like The Deliberative Democracy Consortium and The Democracy Imperative also practice such thinking. These are diverse people, but they all have their feet on the ground, in day–to–day democratic practice, to which they contribute relatively broad and theoretical ideas. ”Frontiers” is an opportunity for practitioners and scholars to advance that kind of work. It is also an annual festival of civic practice and ideas, and we encourage you to attend.