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Center for Communication and Democratic Engagement (CDE)

We foster community & knowledge through democratic engagement

The Center for Communication and Democratic Engagement (formerly called BoulderTalks), located within the Department of Communication, aims to learn from deliberation, dialogue, and educational events held on campus, within the City of Boulder, and community participants within the Boulder County region.

“Democratic engagement can cultivate mutual benefits for students, professors, universities, community organizations, and citizens...while also upholding democratic values of equality and inclusion.”

--Professor Leah Sprain, CDE Director

We are guided by democratic values

At the CDE we value: listening, voice, difference, the environment, knowledge and democratic engagement. We work with partners on campus, in our local community, and globally on a range of issues--including but not limited to: energy democracy, science communication, a just transition, public participation, and diversity. Our CDE activities integrate research, teaching and outreach as well as reflexivity about how we communicate about cultural crises, conflicts and challenges through democratic practices (such as debate, dialogue, deliberation, mediation, restorative justice and performance ethnography).

Inclusion

Inclusive processes include cultivating active engagement to address historic and contemporary systems of power and inequity, attracting underheard voices, and representing the whole community where participants are considered equal.

Participation

Participation can include rich experiences from facilitating dialogues and deliberative conversations to something as deeply meaningful as sharing stories with strangers.

Reciprocity

The ideal that people are entitled to reasonable and nonarbitrary treatment and reasoning that reflects the practice of exchange in deliberative democracy.

Highlighted Programs

Diversity & Difference Praxis

Communication Praxis

Energy & Climate Praxis

Our Research

CDE Fellows Program

All Research Areas

Studying communication theory can help improve the ways we engage each other, build community, and bring about a more just world.

Difference & Diversity

Listening and amplifying marginalized voices and perspectives are necessary to engage and involve a broad number of people about the dynamic systems in which we live.

Communication Praxis

CDE helps network, mobilize, train and support communication praxis—theory and practice--on campus, regionally, nationally, and globally. Providing transformative opportunities to address the greatest challenges of our times.

Energy & Climate

Environmental advocates aware of impacts on the frontlines of climate injustices use new technologies to foster conversation, debate, and action between seemingly disparate spaces.