Bringing the Civic Landscape into Being: How Varied Patterns of Civic Action Respond to and Create Dilemmas in Empowerment Projects

This paper proposes a process for locating civic action, in its varied forms, wherever it may appear. First, develop a clear, a priori definition of the qualities of action you consider “civic.” Simultaneously, observe actors’ varied “typifications (Schutz 1962 , 1970 ; Cicourel 1991 , 1993 ; Cefaï 1994 )” that include action that you would call “civic.” We illustrate how to use this approach, using the case of “empowerment projects (Eliasoph Journal of Civil Society, 12 (3), 247–265, 2016 ):” Observe the typifications that actors themselves experience in empowerment projects, by observing the dilemmas they experience. You will see that actors’ typical patterns of navigating those typical dilemmas often have typical unintended consequences, both for their own emotions, and for the researcher’s aspirations for civic action. In empowerment projects, typical patterns of navigating typical dilemmas tend to make important kinds of politically oriented civic action difficult to conduct. This kind of back-and-forth examination reveals the “civic landscape (Grubb and Henriksen 2018 )” in the making.