Civics Policy Center

Engine of Interest: An Analysis of Conversational Emergence in Structured Dialogue

About Us

Our project will ask whether prompt-initiated dialogue, a common tool of depolarizing or cross-partisan exchange, can elicit interesting conversations. Many spaces that use these kinds of dialogue formats often have dry and stiff conversations, even when they are discussing important topics. We will be working with C-SPAN Classroom to help augment their dialogue-based programming by providing facilitators with a toolkit to help them better understand what a conversation looks like when it's dynamic and receptive across participants. To aid our subject area expertise on what dialogue forums really look like, Ideas for Change has permitted us to view a number of filmed cross-partisan conversations that they initiated over the past year. In turn, we will qualitatively analyze energetic inflection points in these discussions, building our own knowledge base while returning a conversational emergence write-up to our second partner.

Please contact alessandra.pappalardi@yale.edu or marco.getchell@yale.edu with any questions!