Timothy Shaffer
Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Chair of Civil Discourse in The Biden School of Public Policy & Administration
University of Delaware
298H Graham Hall
Newark, DE 19716
Biography
Timothy J. Shaffer (Ph.D., Cornell University) is a Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Resident Fellow and will become the inaugural SNF Chair of Civil Discourse for the SNF Ithaca Initiative in July 2022. Shaffer is also director of Civic Engagement and Deliberative Democracy with the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona.
Connected to these efforts, Shaffer also serves as the associate editor of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy, as a country expert on deliberative democracy with the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem Institute) research project, and as a co-director guiding the work of the Deliberative Pedagogy Lab,
an international project focused on applied scholarship about the ways
that deliberation can transform higher education educational approaches
and environments.
As an interdisciplinary scholar and
practitioner of civil discourse, deliberative democracy, and civic
engagement, Shaffer focuses on the role of civic professionals in
institutional settings such as government, higher education, and
non-governmental organizations.
Through his scholarship, he
contributes to discussions within fields such as public policy,
communication, higher education, and civic studies where themes of
citizenship, professionalism, community, and civic life are explored.
As Karol Sołtan and Peter Levine put it when writing about civic studies:
"Civic
studies asks Shaffer’s question: “What should we do?” It is thus
inevitably about ethics (what is right and good?), about facts (what is
actually going on?) and about strategies (what would work?). Good
strategies may take many forms and use many instruments, but if a
strategy addresses the question “What should we do?”, then it must guide
our own actions. For many of us, institutions and institution-making
are crucial to this enterprise. They embody ideals and values. They can
also be seen as crucial resources."
In recognition of being a scholar committed to engaged scholarship, Shaffer has received the Early Career Recognition Award from the International Association for Research on Service Learning and Community Engagement.
Currently,
Shaffer is working on a number of public-facing research projects
including the use of democratic discussion through organizations in
communities. One example is from the Extension Committee on Organization
and Policy (ECOP)-approved Rapid Response Team on Civil Discourse on
Race Relations which developed "Coming Together For Racial Understanding : Train-the-Trainer Workshop," a training program for community-based educators to utilize dialogue processes to address racial issues in their communities.
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