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  • Contributors

John Dedrick is the vice president and program director at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, Inc. He has a long-standing research interest in the theory and practice of democracy and has worked closely with higher education professionals and community-based forum moderators on numerous scholarly and community-based research studies. Dedrick and co-authors Elizabeth Gish and Keith Melville are working on The Democracy Project, an introduction to public engagement.

Rosa A. Eberly, a free-range rhetorician, is an associate professor of communication arts and sciences and English at Penn State. Formerly an associate professor and the director of the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, she is the author of Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres and co-author with Edward P. J. Corbett of The Elements of Reasoning (2nd ed.). She is a co-editor of Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy and of the Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies. Her current projects focus on higher education and trauma, interdisciplinary methods, and the radio rhetorics of Harry Shearer.

Victoria Faust is a Ph.D. candidate and an undergraduate instructor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin. She holds a Master’s of Public Administration from the Evergreen State College. Her areas of research and practice include the governance and leadership of civil society organizations and civil society and public sector interdependency.

Connie Flanagan, a professor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is the author of Teenage Citizens: The Political Theories of the Young (Harvard University Press, 2013). She is the recipient of the 2012 Research Prize from the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University and of an honorary doctorate in humanities and social sciences from Örebro University in Sweden. [End Page v]

Elizabeth Gish teaches civic engagement and religion at the Honors College at Western Kentucky University. Her teaching, research, and community work focus on the ways that communities can come together, listen to each other, find common ground, and act together to solve problems. She is working with her co-authors, John Dedrick and Keith Melville, on a citizen-centered introduction to politics, The Democracy Project, and she is completing her first book in the field of American religion, Longing: Sexual Purity, Virginity, and Abstinence in the United States Today.

Chalmer E. Labig JR., Ph.D., is an associate professor of management in the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University. His research interests include social justice issues for small businesses and encouraging faculty to engage their students in critical thinking.

Keith Melville (Ph.D. in sociology, Columbia) is a professor at the Fielding Graduate University and an associate at the Kettering Foundation. The author of more than half a dozen trade and academic books, former executive editor at the National Issues Forums, and former senior vice president at Public Agenda, he has written widely about public policy. Along with John Dedrick and Elizabeth Gish, he is co-author of the work in progress The Democracy Project, an introduction to public engagement.

Cynthia Myntti is a professor of public health practice at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She earned her doctorate in social anthropology from the London School of Economics (1983) and has graduate degrees from AUB (M.A., 1974), Johns Hopkins University (mph, 1986), and Yale University (M.Arch., 2004). Myntti worked as a program officer for the Ford Foundation in Cairo and Jakarta and has held university teaching positions in London, Minneapolis, Sanaa, and Beirut. Since 2006, Myntti has directed the Neighborhood Initiative at AUB.

Mark C. Nicholas is the director of assessment at Framingham State University, Massachusetts. He earned a doctorate in educational studies from the University of Cincinnati. He formerly worked as assistant director of university assessment at Oklahoma State University. He has researched and published on critical thinking as a concept and on making critical thinking an assessable outcome in higher education.

Seth S. Pollack is a professor of service learning and the founding faculty director of the Service Learning Institute at California State University, Monterey Bay. Pollack’s academic interests are in civic engagement, social change, and the role of...

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