Kansas State University’s Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy in collaboration with the Communication Studies department will be holding a pair of community discussions on immigration this Tuesday and Wednesday.
The talks will be non-partisan group discussions on multiple topics under the umbrella of immigration based on a format created by the National Issues Forums Institute. Tuesday’s talks will take place in the Manhattan Public Library Auditorium starting at 5 p.m., Wednesday’s will be in the Leadership Studies Building at K-State starting at 7 p.m.
The KSU Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy’s assistant director, Dr. Timothy Shaffer, said on Monday’s edition of KMAN’s In Focus that participants will be broken up into groups of no more than 10 for the discussions. He added that the talks will also be moderated in a non-partisan fashion by students trained in moderation. The program is titled ‘Coming to America: Who should we welcome, what should we do?’
“There are discussion points about enforcing the laws fairly, how do we think about being a beacon of freedom,” said Shaffer. “And then there’s this kind of third framing that really is like ‘we need to step back a little bit from some of the really divisive rhetoric and kind of think about our shared values and views.'”
Shaffer said that the format of the discussions are a deliberative forum and will follow a NIFI framework for the topic.
“It’s framed as ‘well, if we think about this issue, here are some of the implications or the drawbacks — are we ok with that?,'” Shaffer said. “Which helps us get out of the typical framing, some of the partisan approaches we can have to any of these issues.”
The talks fall in line with the institute’s stated goal of promoting “greater citizen participation in deliberation and public dialogue.”
“Hopefully people see it as a chance to be in some conversation with some people that they might not otherwise sit down and talk about these things with,” said Shaffer.
