Civic Participation Project

The Civic Participation Project at Teachers College is an interdisciplinary hub for bringing together participatory work going on campus wide. CPP’s co-directors are Lalitha Vasudevan, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, and Laura Smith.

We ask: Can academic scholarship become a force that promotes the broad access of all citizens to social platforms, opportunities, and resources? As a contemporary exemplar of the College’s historic commitments to inclusion, CCP’s aim is to demonstrate that the answer is yes.

This question and its answer are unmistakably aspirational, but they are not merely so. Our aims are premised in specific elements of the work that we do and the events that we organize, yet they also connect both concretely and philosophically to conceptions of authentic inclusive democracy. Generally speaking, we enact our aims by bringing a multifaceted, participatory, inclusive emphasis to bear upon our work: our scholarly interests within the fields of education and psychology, the methods by which we study them, and the academic settings and systems in which these exist.