Cowboys Coming Together: Campus-Based Dialogues on Race and Racial Equity

Abstract

Public deliberation, as a general approach to exploring complex issues facing geographically defined communities as well as increasing student civic engagement, has gained standing in recent years as a civic engagement tool on college campuses. Everyday Democracy’s Dialogue to Change (D2C) program provides a process through which participants deliberate and, most importantly, act toward change to address locally identified issues of concern in the campus-as-community. The purpose of this article is twofold: to describe Cowboys Coming Together, a local implementation of D2C at Oklahoma State University, and to present findings from the initial research exploring the influence of change-oriented deliberative approaches on individual participants and the campus-as-community.