Spotlights
Global Civil Discourse Map developed at Grand Valley
June 03, 2022
A Global Civil Discourse Map has been developed at Grand Valley! Collaboration between many different disciplines within GVSU has led to the creation of a tool that measures the level of civil discourse in countries across the globe and that can help the university play a leading role on one of the planet’s most critical issues.
Professor Jeff Kelly Lowenstein is the current Endowed Professor of Civil Discourse at the Padnos/Sarosik Center for Civil Discourse. The center was founded through the generous gift of Shelley Padnos and Carol Sarosik to help create more inclusive, tolerant, and peaceful communities.
While developing his new course IDS 350, or Journalism and Global Civil Discourse, Jeff did extensive reading about the implications for civil discourse of the tension between the people trying to share accurate information with the public, and those people, organizations, and governments trying to misinform and disinform the public. Those people trying to provide accurate information to the public are often targeted for attack by those seeking to misinform and disinform.
He found that opponents of accurate information use a consistent set of strategies to attack and discredit the people doing that work. He determined that a global map would be an effective way to make sense of how these strategies play out in different countries.
Samantha Johnson, the Padnos/Sarosik Civil Discourse intern, and Nicholas Moran, then the Editor-In-Chief of the Lanthorn, began work on the map in the summer of 2020. They looked up and entered information about each country’s national and international promises of press and media freedoms. The two factors that were used to signify a public commitment to freedom of the press were signing the Millennium Declaration of 2000, and the country’s level of internet access. The Millennium Declaration of 2000 reaffirmed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights that included freedom of speech and media.
Jeff worked with his Civil Discourse students in the fall of 2020 on further developing the project. With this baseline of what was being promised, the students proceeded to compare the promises to what was actually occurring in each country. They did that by looking at variables like the level of online censorship and the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index that assesses the state of journalism in 180 countries and territories.
A group of senior Computer Science students built the map itself as a part of their senior project with Professor Jonathan Engelsma. The students involved contributed all of the information used in the Global Civil Discourse Map that launched at the 2021 Civil Discourse Symposium. GrandPR, a student-run organization supervised by Professor Adrienne Wallace, promoted the project.
Work continued on the project into the fall of 2021, when a second civil discourse class added the criteria of literacy rate and updated the final weighting of the ranking formula as follows:
35 % Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index
32.5% Internet Access
20% Online Censorship
7.5% Literacy Rate
5% Millennium Declaration of 2000 signed
A subsequent group of CIS students developed the visual aspects of the map to add different colors, designed the map to be ADA accessible, and added further features for users to explore.
The Global Civil Discourse Map team received a Teaching Innovation Grant from the Pew FacultyTeaching and Learning Center (FTLC). This support allowed further collaboration across disciplines by partnering with Spanish, French, and Multimedia Journalism faculty and their students. Under the supervision of Professors Janel Pettes Guikema and Médar Serrata, upper-level students of French and Spanish had the privilege of interviewing journalists from 10 different French- and Spanish-speaking countries around the world about what that tension has meant for their work and lives.
Professor James Ford and his Multimedia Journalism students assisted with recording and editing the interviews that will be embedded within that country’s profile on the map. A tremendous amount of work went into editing, rearranging, transcribing, and translating the interviews, but student feedback from the first round of interviews in Winter 2022 was overwhelmingly positive. The faculty plan to collaborate with students and faculty in other disciplines in order to expand the project and its available content.
These interviews provided insight into what journalists across the world risk in order to help accurate information reach the public in countries where regimes and organizations are trying to suppress the truth. For example, Ignace Sossou, a Beninese journalist who was interviewed by GVSU French students, had tweeted accurately a comment made by a public prosecutor at a conference on December 18, 2019. On December 20, 2019, he was arrested without a warrant and his home and phone were searched. On December 24, 2019 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison and received a fine. Eventually his sentence was reduced to 6 months and he was released in June 2020. This kind of incident is becoming a shockingly regular occurrence in the world. Despite the work of organizations across the globe attempting to fight back against this injustice, journalists are still being targeted for doing their work of informing the public. Hearing these stories firsthand, in the language spoken by the journalists, was very impactful for the students involved.
This summer, Jeff will to go to South Africa with support from the Padnos/Sarosik Center for Civil Discourse, the Center for Scholarly and Creative Excellence, and the Padnos International Center to interview journalists in that part of the world. He will also be on sabbatical in Japan in Winter 2023, and will continue to have these conversations with journalists in that country and region. He welcomes anyone who is interested in the project to come to him to discuss their ideas and see if they can assist with any part of the project. The project seeks to both provide a high-impact student experience as well as advance interdisciplinary scholarly work.
Its broader ambition is for GVSU to become a national and international leader on one of the most vital topics facing the global community. In the future there will be regular public events hosted by the Civil Discourse Center where people who are doing this work within GVSU will present the project as it progresses with people around the world who share a similar commitment.
If you would like to learn more about the Global Discourse Map or inquire about becoming involved in the project, please reach out to Professor Jeff Kelly Lowenstein at [email protected].