Editors: Thomas S. Poetter, John Chambers, Ryan W. Denney, Jennifer Flory Edwards, Kevin Fitzgerald, Ashley Cartell Johnson, Peggy S. Larrick, M.A. Moyer, Don C. Murray, Vijay Keshaorao Paralkar, Brittany Aronson, Joel R. Malin, Andrew Saultz

About the Book: 

The ultimate question explored in this book – a question we all must all ask ourselves – is this: Will our global society repurpose democracy into practices that create a creature of hope: empowered democracy by and with a diverse polis?  Or, will we allow the global elite to repurpose our democratic language into monsters of terror: an agenda that uses the polis crafted at the hands of a powerful few treating people as human capital (the monster let loose)?

This book offers its readers (which should include anyone interested in the future of a democratic world) ways to think about repurposing traditional frameworks of democracy, curriculum, and education that can, and must be, community-driven, open-ended, messy, and indeterminate processes of agency and empowerment for us all. This book informs the reader that there’s a new freedom in our collective capacity to imagine how we can repurpose things: fitting together, working together, each of us a facet in a new purpose – each has a part to play in building a new creative design for educating our children and for the life we seek to build. We will build ourselves as self-determined, cooperative fragments – rearranging the bigger picture. Because, if we can change perception, we can change reality.

From the Foreword by Morna McDermott, Towson University