Constructing public dialogue: A critical discourse analysis of the public discourse practices that shape civic engagement in Portland, Oregon's neighborhood association program

Deliberative democracy and civic renewal movement theorists claim that the basis of renewal for a declining and disempowered public sphere is new ways of understanding citizenship and governance structures that embrace participatory practices. They argue that public dialogue is a key form of social action through which participatory practices are engaged. While current practices of public dialogue are criticized, some scholars claim that democratic deliberative practices are emerging through locally based neighborhood associations. They identify Portland, Oregon's neighborhood association program as one exemplary model.; This research examines public dialogue in nine workshops at Portland's 2002 Neighborhood Association Summit. It finds the regular practice of ten normative features of democratic deliberative public dialogue across the workshops. It demonstrates that the features were not practiced as individual, neutral civic skills and processes, but that they were practiced in five clusters that performed social and political work.; Employing Fairclough's method of critical discourse analysis, this study compares patterns of discourse across the clusters to the discourses of the Portland Way, the dominant ideology that shapes civic engagement in this community. It examines how the patterns worked to transmit, maintain, resist, and/or transform the dominant ideology.; The findings demonstrate that: (1) the orientation of the workshop presenters to the discourses of the Portland Way was a key indicator of whether the dominant practices were transmitted, maintained, resisted, and/or transformed; (2) emancipatory dialogue emerged in all of the clusters except practices of civic engagement; and (3) empowering dialogue was minimal in which the activities of neighborhood association activists were linked to political organizing and public policy development, despite regular resistance.; The study concludes that the presence of model forms of deliberative and emancipatory dialogue does not necessarily achieve empowerment for civic activists, and that power relationships embedded in the hegemonic discourses of a dominant ideology must be accounted for in creating participatory practices of civic engagement. It demonstrates the constructive force of language; the role of ideological relations of power in everyday political discourses; the construction through dialogue of practices of civic engagement; and the Summit as a model for participatory forms of civic engagement.