Civic understanding grows in face-to-face talk rather than inside individuals.

Evidence

For theorists of the public sphere, moral and political understanding are not inert objects that people can carry around inside their own heads and implant in the heads of others. Rather, these theorists assume that people must learn how to understand the larger world by interacting and talking about social issues, in groups. … It also includes the free-form, sociable, playful, esthetic public life that happens in cafés, informal gatherings, bars, coffeehouses, theaters, salons, dances, poetry readings, even soccer teams … Such sociable gatherings can be fertile ground for political life. While not exclusively or even primarily politically motivated, these gatherings offer the familiarity that is a necessary precondition for some kinds of public life. Sociable familiar gatherings can create an infinitely nuanced stock of common sense and feeling, common knowledge and myths, common style, rhythm, and manners; background knowledge for how to act and how to be. Every day, people go to work, get stuck in traffic jams, pay bills, become involuntarily entangled with anonymous strangers; in the sociable public sphere, in contrast, people affirm voluntary connections to particular people. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 123

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core question of solidarity formed through positive shared projects versus out-group threat — this is the non-oppositional wellspring theory Eliasoph’s cases will test. — connects to: Public talk itself, not just outcome interest, creates selves and communities. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 163; Citizens jointly create contexts for political conversation through civic practices — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 186; Civic beliefs are equivocal cultural productions, not fixed inner states — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 170

Broader Connections

• Public talk itself, not just outcome interest, creates selves and communities. #corroborates (0.85) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 163
• Citizens jointly create contexts for political conversation through civic practices #expands (0.80) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 186
• Civic beliefs are equivocal cultural productions, not fixed inner states #corroborates (0.75) — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”, 170