Rethinking Civic Identity - NaPodPoMo 2025 Day 16

Day 16 of our 30-day challenge on bridging our divides.

For the first half of this series, we’ve been answering your questions about how we come together across differences — tackling topics like moving from talk to action, handling disinformation, navigating high-stakes conversations, and dealing with power imbalances.

Across all these conversations, one theme keeps resurfacing:our relationship to democracy and to one another.

It’s tempting to view division purely through a partisan lens.But a more powerful way to understand our divides may be through our civic identity — our shared rights, roles, and responsibilities as members of the same society.

If we’re going to bridge divides, we have to understand what it means to be a citizen in a fractured political environment.

So today, we’re shifting the format slightly to zoom in on that big idea:What is civic identity, and why does it matter so much for bridging?

To explore this, we hear from June Klees, a college civics professor who studies how young people understand and engage with their civic roles.

Learn more: OutrageOverload.net

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