In response to recent incidents of incivility across the UC campuses, the DHI’s Civility Project draws upon our campus’s strengths in research across the disciplines, bringing them to bear upon questions our community must ask itself in order to develop or refine a shared notion of civility, and to foster the conditions necessary to nurture it. Incorporating research from the social sciences, humanities, and arts, this project is designed to engage members of the university community in an examination of how we define and achieve civility on campus.
Project Directors: Carolyn de la Peña, Jessica Loudermilk
Advisory Board: Tristan Josephson, Sunaina Maira, Andrés Reséndez, Mikael Villalobos, Michael F. Winter
Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the UC Davis Office of the Chancellor, the UC Davis Humanities Institute, the California Cultures Initiative, the Office of Campus Community Relations, the Peter J. Shields Library, and the Department of History
(Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience
An original documentary theatre piece based on interviews with members of the UC Davis community
Thursday, October 27 & Friday, October 28, 2011
Vanderhoef Studio Theatre in the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts
This documentary theatre piece explores the campus community’s emotional responses to the alarming series of uncivil moments and hate-based incidents on the UC Davis campus in 2010. Based entirely on transcripts of interviews conducted on campus by a group of student researchers and performers, the piece aims to provide us with a reflection of ourselves as individuals reacting to moments which—at least temporarily—erupt the notion of community by presenting difference as both essential and intolerable. (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience gives voice to the interior, emotional experience of incivility on campus and insists that we listen to these voices which are rarely part of our official record of the events, but that drive our responses to moments of incivility and in turn, shape our definitions of what civility is and the conditions necessary to achieve it. Read more at dhi.ucdavis.edu/civility.
Graduate Fellow/Director: Chris McCoy
Faculty Advisor: Peter Lichtenfels
Civility Project Ensemble: Kevin Adamski, Christopher Boyle, Mironda Burch, Brendan Crotty, Marisel Gabourel, Bijan Ghiasi, Ori Gold, Jacklyn Joanino, Erica Kalingking, Anna Kritikos, Shelby Maples, Brenda Marin Rodriguez, Austin Martin, Michelle Rossi, Alexander Scott, Sara Soto, Sam Temming, Johnathan Yu
Paper Takes: The Power of Uncivil Words
An exhibition of materials from the Shields Library’s Walter Goldwater Radical Pamphlets collection
Opening October 27, 2011 and on display until November 30, 2011
Walter A. Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center
Looking beyond the bounds of campus, this exhibition explores the ways in which intolerant views are communicated and disseminated through pamphlets. Paper Takes explores the particular rhetoric supporting race-based hatred, gender and sexuality bias, and political divisiveness to better understand the dominant discourses that frame some of our most uncivil exchanges. Displaying a selection from more than 17,000 items in the leading collection of “extreme” pamphlets in the United States, housed in Shields Special Collections, this exhibition provides historical depth to our understanding of the language of hate and intolerance, traces of which remain potent today. Read more at dhi.ucdavis.edu/civility.
Graduate Research Fellow: Jessica Mayhew
Faculty Advisor: Professor Kathy Olmsted
Exhibit Design Director: Professor Tim McNeil
Exhibit Designer: Elizabeth August
Graphic Designer: Sarah Marrone
Library Support: Daryl Morrison, Head of Special Collections; John Sherlock, Special Collections and Rare Books Librarian; John Skarstad, University Archivist; Patricia Inouye, California State and Local Government Documents Librarian; Sara Gunasekara, Collections Manager; Liz Phillips, Manuscript Archivist; Jenny Hodge, Library Assistant II
Making Sense of (In)Civility: Voices from UC Davis
Understanding the impact of intolerance on our own campus
Based on interviews with UC Davis administrators, staff, students, and faculty, this look at our campus uses tools of sociological analysis to understand how the university’s structures determine what becomes “uncivil” on campus and frame the range of responses that can take place to these incidents. Questions asked include: at what point does the administration respond to uncivil acts, and what are the limits of possible responses to those acts? How do individuals who work within the university define a successful outcome when addressing an incident of incivility? What does civility mean to various individuals—is this the word we should be using to identify the conditions of intolerance, and find ways to address it? And, what has the university achieved through recent responses to incidents—and what are the limits of those responses?
A web component to this project is accessible here.
Graduate Research Fellow: Julie Setele
Faculty Advisor: Laura Grindstaff
Undergraduate Research Assistants: Kamry Zhang, Frances Gocuan
The Limits of Incivility
Testing a Concept - Imagining a Community - Tracing a History
A history of incivility on UC campuses from the 1960s forward
To understand the history of incivility on the UC campuses, this project
examines the underlying rhetorical foundations and university
structures that guide and frame actions, responses, policies, and
visions in the UC system. What you'll find here is both a history of
construction and reconstruction, as the UC builds and renovates itself
through the work of many of its constituent parts, and a history of
fragmentation and collage, as different documents, people, and
campuses are divided and composited together into a single system of
higher education.
This web-based project explores a history of incivility on UC campuses in the context of the public university as an environment that is characterized by goals that often seem to be in tension: free expression and the exchange of ideas, and facilitating inclusion and tolerance in an increasingly diverse population. Tracing this tension from the largely Berkeley-based Free Speech Movement in the 1960s to the recent troubling incidents of hate and incivility at several UC campuses, the web history synthesizes journalistic evidence of key events, records of campuses’ official responses to those events, and documentation of the rapidly shifting demographics of the UC system from the 1960s forward that constitute that backdrop against which these events occur.
Graduate Research Fellow: Lia Winfield
Graduate Fellow/Concept Designer: Josef Nguyen
Faculty Advisor: Professor Kathy Olmsted
Graphic Designer: Sarah Marrone
