# Owning Citizens' Dreams
## A Juggler's Handbook for Narrative Governance and Democratic Participation

**Lester Leavitt, M.P.A.**

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### Proposed Subtitle Alternatives
- *Training Multidisciplinary Advocates for Contested Democratic Spaces*
- *From Street-Level Bureaucracy to Speculative Resistance*
- *A Field Guide for Progressive Advocacy in Contested Democracies*

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## The Book in One Paragraph

This textbook trains students to become "Jugglers" — multidisciplinary advocates who can operate simultaneously as policy analysts, narrative strategists, community organizers, and storytellers in contested democratic spaces. Drawing on twelve years of research across public administration, narrative theory, media studies, social psychology, and information systems, the book provides a unified framework for understanding how dominant groups mobilize bias against vulnerable populations through sustaining institutions and interpretive monopolies, and equips students with the analytical tools and practical methods to displace marginalizing narratives with emergent governing narratives that make representative democracy actually representative. The book is designed for use with two companion texts: the author's scholarly memoir *Forbidden Friends: A History of Colonialism in the New World* (4th ed.) and selected volumes from the speculative fiction trilogy *Confluence: The Driftless Rivers Trilogy*, which dramatize the theoretical framework in lived experience and imagined futures, respectively.

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## Origin of the Title

The phrase "owning citizens' dreams" originates in the author's 2014 research paper presented at an international conference on local public administration in Brașov, Romania, and subsequently submitted to the *Revista Română de Administrație Publică Locală*. The paper argued that transformational change at the local level begins when an activist mayor or administrative official takes ownership of the hopes and dreams of *all* constituents — including those cast by dominant narratives as "undeserving" or "deviant." The "Juggler" is the multidisciplinary leader trained to make this possible.

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## Source Corpus

The textbook synthesizes and restructures material from the following published and unpublished works by the author:

| Document | Date | Function in Textbook |
|---|---|---|
| "A Purple Primaries Protocol for Progressive Policy Victories in 'Deep-Red' American States," *Administrative Theory & Praxis* 35(3) | 2013 | Electoral strategy framework |
| "Institutional Memory and ICT: Ingredients for Direct Democracy and Global Solidarity," *Int'l Journal of ICT and Human Development* 5(3) | 2013 | ICT architecture and institutional memory theory |
| "Information Communication Technology and the Street-Level Bureaucrat: Tools for Social Equity and Progressive Activism," in *Human Development and Interaction in the Age of Ubiquitous Technology* (IGI Global) | 2016 | Organizational model, ideograph concept, database architecture |
| "Owning Citizens' Dreams: Good Governance Leadership at the Local Level" — conference paper, Brașov, Romania / submitted to *Revista Română de Administrație Publică Locală* | 2014 | Juggler framework, activist mayor model, contact hypothesis integration, four hypotheses |
| Dissertation version 8: "Power and the Illegitimate Leader: A Guide for the Social Equity Activist" (unpublished) | 2014 | Grand theoretical architecture, terror management theory, six hypotheses, spiritual prisons |
| Dissertation version 24: "Administrative Discretion in Pursuit of Social Equity" (unpublished) | 2016 | Empirical methodology, cultural abidance typology, discretionary act scoring, PFLAG case study |
| *Forbidden Friends: A History of Colonialism in the New World*, 4th ed. (memoir) | In progress | Companion text: lived phenomenology of the theoretical framework |
| *Confluence: The Driftless Rivers Trilogy* — *Soybeans*, *Aceguá*, *Allegory Protocol* (speculative fiction) | Completed | Companion text: speculative dramatization of the theoretical framework |

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## Pedagogical Design

### Tandem-Text Model

Each unit of the textbook is designed to be taught alongside assigned readings from *Forbidden Friends* and/or the *Confluence* trilogy. The textbook provides the analytical framework; the memoir provides the phenomenological evidence; the fiction provides the speculative projection. Students encounter the same theoretical concepts — sustaining institutions, interpretive monopolies, cultural abidance, discourse structuration, emergent narrative communities — in three registers: scholarly analysis, lived experience, and imagined consequence.

### "Substitute Your Own" Exercises

Following the pedagogical method established in the Romanian conference paper, every unit concludes with structured exercises that instruct students to substitute their own vulnerable population, geographic context, and policy campaign into the frameworks presented. Students in the University of Illinois Springfield's Public Policy program, for example, would apply the frameworks to Illinois communities, electoral processes, and state-level policy dynamics they can observe directly.

### Unit Structure (recurring)

Each unit follows a five-part pattern:

1. **The Theory** — Scholarly framework drawn from the research corpus
2. **The Case** — Primary case study from the author's research or lived experience
3. **The Method** — Analytical tool or research technique students can replicate
4. **The Story** — Assigned companion reading from *Forbidden Friends* or *Confluence*
5. **The Field** — Student exercise applying the framework to their own community

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## Part I: The Problem of Mobilized Bias

### Unit 1 — Enlarging the Problem

**Core argument:** Social equity challenges cannot be solved by examining individual marginalized populations in isolation. Following the Eisenhower Principle, the problem must be made bigger — examining how dominant groups mobilize bias against *all* vulnerable populations through the same structural mechanisms.

**Key concepts:**
- Schneider & Ingram's social construction of target populations: "undeserving" vs. "deviant"
- Bachrach & Baratz's two faces of power: mobilization of bias and the power of nondecision
- The Eisenhower Principle applied to social equity research
- Enlarging the problem: from individual group advocacy to structural analysis of bias itself

**Primary sources:** Romanian paper (introduction and "Enlarging the Problem"); Dissertation v8 (Chapter II, literature review on bias)

**Case study:** The 2004 Utah constitutional amendment on marriage — how a ballot initiative designed to target one "deviant" population was written broadly enough to deny recognition to any non-traditional household arrangement, revealing the structural nature of the bias.

**Companion reading:** *Forbidden Friends* — chapters on the author's experience within Mormon sustaining institutions; the spiritual prisons passage.

**Student exercise:** Identify a marginalized population in your community. Classify the dominant narrative about that population using Schneider & Ingram's matrix (undeserving or deviant). Then enlarge the problem: identify at least two other populations in your community subjected to the same *structural mechanism* of bias, even if the surface-level narratives differ. Map the connections.

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### Unit 2 — Cultural Abidance and the Architecture of Obedience

**Core argument:** Bias persists not primarily through active malice but through cultural abidance — the habitual performance of narratives that reproduce marginalization without conscious intent. Understanding why people abide is more analytically useful than cataloguing what they believe.

**Key concepts:**
- Bourdieu's habitus: "clinging to the interpretive monopoly"
- Foucault's dividing practices
- Maynard-Moody & Musheno's "cops, teachers, counselors" framework
- Cultural abidance as the mechanism of narrative reproduction
- The efficiency-effectiveness dichotomy (Stivers): why bureaucracies optimize for compliance rather than justice

**Primary sources:** Dissertation v24 (Chapter II, cultural abidance framework); Romanian paper (ostensive/performative distinction); Dissertation v8 (terror management theory)

**Case study:** The Ontario same-sex marriage banns — a bureaucratic procedure (publishing banns) that reproduced marginalization through routine administrative performance, not through any individual's conscious decision to discriminate.

**Companion reading:** *Forbidden Friends* — chapters on the author's decades of cultural abidance within a faith community; the cost of shunning analysis from Dissertation v8.

**Student exercise:** Identify a routine administrative procedure in your local government (permitting, school enrollment, benefit eligibility, policing protocols). Analyze it for cultural abidance: where does the procedure reproduce marginalization through habit rather than intent? Interview a street-level bureaucrat who administers the procedure. Do they recognize the abidance pattern?

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### Unit 3 — Terror Management and the Fear of Change

**Core argument:** The intractability of marginalizing narratives cannot be explained by politics alone. Terror management theory reveals that sustaining institutions derive their power from existential anxiety — the fear of mortality that drives humans to affiliate with "immortal" institutions. Pluralism is experienced as an existential threat because it undermines the ostensive view of the narrative that makes the institution eternal.

**Key concepts:**
- Ernest Becker's *Denial of Death* and the mortality salience hypothesis
- Terror management theory (Davis, Juhl & Routledge): how death anxiety drives worldview defense
- Weber's Protestant ethic as terror management: earthly success as sign of heavenly favor
- The 4,300 narratives: how a single sustaining institution engineers comprehensive behavioral control
- Why "worldview threat" is more analytically precise than "prejudice"

**Primary sources:** Dissertation v8 (terror management sections); Romanian paper ("The Ostensive View and Terror Management Theory")

**Case study:** The economics of trickle-down as performed terror management — how supply-side economics was pitched with religious-like zeal because it aligned with the Protestant work ethic narrative that equated wealth with divine favor and poverty with moral failing.

**Companion reading:** *Forbidden Friends* — the author's account of discovering that the 34-year "prison sentence" imposed for his sexuality was enforced through terror management mechanisms, not through rational argument. *Confluence* trilogy — relevant passages on how AI systems in the novels recognize and model terror management patterns in political behavior.

**Student exercise:** Identify a policy debate in your state where opposition to change appears disproportionate to the material stakes involved. Analyze the opposition through a terror management lens: what existential anxiety is being activated? What sustaining institution is threatened? What would the "cost of shunning" be for a member of the dominant community who broke ranks?

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## Part II: The Framework for Displacement

### Unit 4 — Governing Narratives and the Displacement Principle

**Core argument:** Marginalizing narratives cannot be defeated through deconstruction — attempting to prove the "old truth" wrong and replace it with a "new truth" activates zero-sum threat responses and strengthens the sustaining institution. The alternative is displacement: generating emergent narratives that tell a more compelling story without requiring the dominant community to concede that their worldview was wrong.

**Key concepts:**
- Hugh Miller's governing narratives: ostensive vs. performative views
- The displacement principle: "displace, not deconstruct"
- Discourse structuration (Hajer): how coalitions form around story lines
- Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding: media constructs reality, never reflects it
- The performative insertion: "Our path to God" vs. "The path to God"
- The 1978 Mormon revelation on Black priesthood as paradigm case of successful displacement

**Primary sources:** Romanian paper ("Ostensive and Performative Views," "Discourse Structuration"); MOCSIE chapter ("Creating Emergent Narrative Communities"); Miller, *Governing Narratives* (2012)

**Case study:** The evolution of marriage equality discourse in the United States — from "gay rights" (zero-sum framing that activated worldview threat) to "marriage equality" and "family values" (displacement framing that found shared premises with moderate conservatives). The 60%-opposed to 55%-approving shift as measurable discourse structuration.

**Companion reading:** *Confluence* trilogy — chapters where characters must build counter-narratives against corporate consolidation of agriculture without triggering the "outside agitator" threat response in rural communities.

**Student exercise:** Select a policy proposal currently stalled in your state legislature. Identify the interpretive monopoly narrative blocking it. Draft two alternative framings: one that attempts deconstruction (proving the blocking narrative wrong) and one that attempts displacement (finding a shared premise that makes the blocking narrative less relevant). Test both framings on three people outside your program. Document the responses.

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### Unit 5 — Sustaining Institutions, Interpretive Monopolies, and Structural Holes

**Core argument:** Bias is not free-floating prejudice — it is manufactured, maintained, and defended by sustaining institutions that treat their core narratives as interpretive monopolies. These institutions maintain discipline by "closing structural holes" — punishing internal dissent through shunning, excommunication, or other forms of social death. Understanding the institutional architecture of bias is prerequisite to designing effective displacement strategies.

**Key concepts:**
- Narrative communities (Baker): groups held together by shared subscription to narratives
- Interpretive monopolies: narratives defended as the only permissible reading
- Sustaining institutions: organizational structures that defend interpretive monopolies
- Structural holes (Sandström & Carlsson): gaps in network cohesion that institutions must close to maintain control
- Homogeneous vs. heterogeneous policy networks: efficiency vs. effectiveness
- The "closing" mechanism: how dissent is punished and conformity rewarded

**Primary sources:** Romanian paper (Figure 3 and definitions section); MOCSIE chapter (narrative communities and sustaining institutions); Dissertation v8 (H1 and H2); Sandström & Carlsson (2008)

**Case study:** California's Proposition 8 — $39 million spent, $20 million from a single sustaining institution (LDS Church) mobilized by a letter read from every pulpit in the state. Analysis of how a homogeneous policy network's ability to "close holes" through hierarchical communication makes it formidably efficient, and why heterogeneous progressive coalitions lack equivalent mechanisms.

**Companion reading:** *Forbidden Friends* — the author's excommunication as a case study in structural hole closure. The cost-benefit analysis of dissent within a sustaining institution that promises eternal consequences.

**Student exercise:** Map a sustaining institution in your community (religious organization, political party, professional association, cultural institution). Identify its core interpretive monopoly. Document one instance where the institution "closed a structural hole" — punished internal dissent or deviation. Analyze: what was the cost of shunning? What would it take to make that cost negligible?

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### Unit 6 — The Activist Mayor and the Ownership of Dreams

**Core argument:** Transformational change for vulnerable populations most frequently germinates at the local level when an elected official — typically a mayor — takes personal ownership of the hopes and dreams of marginalized constituents. This happens because oppressed populations concentrate in neighborhoods, earning the acceptance of their neighbors, which translates into local political representation. The structural challenge is elevating local acceptance to state-level policy change against the resistance of dominant-group state legislatures.

**Key concepts:**
- The concentration hypothesis: marginalized populations self-affiliate into neighborhoods, increasing local political power
- Ownership of dreams: the decision by a local official to champion causes for vulnerable populations
- Dillon Rule vs. Home Rule: how state constitutional structures determine the scope of local autonomy
- The illegitimacy of hierarchical override: when state power blocks local provision of equitable public goods
- Gulick's four structural lenses (geography, process, persons, purpose) applied to state-local conflict
- Follett's Law of the Situation: obedience to the functional unit, not the hierarchy

**Primary sources:** Romanian paper ("The Threat of 'Undeserving' People," "The Threat of 'Deviant' People," "The Structure of Administration"); Dissertation v8 (devolving state functions)

**Case studies:** (1) Mayor Rocky Anderson, Salt Lake City — domestic partner benefits enacted as "adult designee" benefits to circumvent punitive state constitutional language. (2) Charter school policies in Miami and New Orleans — state legislatures stripping resources from inner-city public schools. (3) The author's 2026 experience before the Illinois State Officers Electoral Board — procedural mechanisms used to challenge ballot access as a form of bias mobilization.

**Companion reading:** *Forbidden Friends* — chapters on the author's four years of direct engagement with rural Illinois political structures and the Driftless Area's political landscape.

**Student exercise:** Identify a policy area where your local government and your state government are in tension over the provision of public goods to a vulnerable population. Apply Gulick's four lenses: which structural dimension(s) does the state invoke to override local provision? Interview a local official about whether they perceive the state override as legitimate. Assess whether the local official has "taken ownership" of the dreams of the affected population, or defers to state authority.

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## Part III: The Tools for Democratic Participation

### Unit 7 — Institutional Memory and the Consultable Record

**Core argument:** Progressive movements fail not because they lack passion, energy, or moral clarity, but because they lack institutional memory. Conservative sustaining institutions benefit from centuries of accumulated narrative infrastructure. Progressive movements start from scratch with every campaign. An engineered institutional memory — a "consultable record of what man has said" (Geertz) — is the prerequisite for converting protest narratives into governing narratives.

**Key concepts:**
- Geertz's "thick description" and the consultable record
- Thayer's institutional memory for consensus-building small groups
- Morgan's organizations-as-brains: distributing intelligence throughout the enterprise
- The distinction between information (which protest movements generate abundantly) and systems (which they lack)
- Crowd-sourced media as both political tool and therapeutic process
- The MOCSIE Systems architecture: six media campaigns, six policy campaigns, four-tiered drill-down

**Primary sources:** MOCSIE chapter (full ICT architecture); Romanian paper ("Institutional Memory," Figure 9); Dissertation v8 (H5)

**Case study:** The Occupy movement's failure to convert protest narratives into governing narratives — enormous quantities of documentation from daily "circle time" sessions, manifestos, and media, but no system to make it retrievable as policy-supporting narrative threads.

**Companion reading:** *Confluence* trilogy — *Allegory Protocol* chapters on AI systems that function as institutional memory for democratic resistance movements, and the ethical questions that arise when algorithmic systems curate political narratives.

**Student exercise:** Select a recent or ongoing protest movement or advocacy campaign in your area. Audit its institutional memory: What documentation exists? How is it stored? Can it be retrieved as narrative threads supporting specific policy proposals? Design a minimal institutional memory system (it can be as simple as a structured shared drive) that would allow the campaign's accumulated knowledge to be consultable by new participants.

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### Unit 8 — The Ideograph and the Narrative Thread

**Core argument:** The building block of institutional memory is the ideograph — a discrete media artifact (image, blog post, video, testimony) that carries connotative meaning beyond its literal content. When properly archived with consensus-building metadata, ideographs can be assembled algorithmically into narrative threads that tell compelling stories in support of policy change. The system works because governing policies are not fact-based — they are narrative-based. Good research does not determine policymaking; compelling arguments do.

**Key concepts:**
- The ideograph as unit of analysis (Miller, 2004; McGee, 1980)
- Connotation, denotation, and framing: how an image becomes a political argument
- The protractor model: rating ideographs on a political spectrum (0-10) to identify viable narrative threads
- Mohamed Bouazizi as paradigm ideograph: a cell phone image that toppled a dictator
- The blog as policy-proposal vehicle: how personal testimony becomes legislative ammunition
- The "deciding moment" (Miller): "Most likely, I will do what I have done before, though maybe not this time"

**Primary sources:** MOCSIE chapter ("The Ideographic Records," "Blogs as Ideographs," Figure 7); Romanian paper (narrative threads and retrieval)

**Case study:** The blog post by "Melissa" — a Southern conservative woman who moved to Canada and discovered that universal healthcare was not the catastrophe she'd been told it would be. Analysis of how a single personal testimony, properly framed and contextualized within an institutional memory, provides a ready-made policy-proposal framework.

**Companion reading:** *Forbidden Friends* — chapters where the author's own testimony functions as ideograph, carrying connotative meaning about systemic marginalization beyond the literal biographical details.

**Student exercise:** Create three ideographs for a policy campaign of your choosing. One should be visual (photograph or graphic), one should be testimonial (blog post or personal narrative), and one should be analytical (data visualization or research summary). For each, complete the archiving metadata: which of the six policy campaigns does it support? Which sustaining institution does it address? Where does it fall on the political spectrum (0-10)? What narrative thread could connect all three?

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### Unit 9 — Contact Hypothesis and the Engineering of Encounter

**Core argument:** Displacing marginalizing narratives requires more than better arguments — it requires engineered opportunities for contact between populations that sustaining institutions have kept separated. Allport's contact hypothesis (expanded by Aronson) provides the conditions under which prejudice reduction occurs. Parasocial contact through media extends this to populations that cannot meet face-to-face. The Juggler's role includes designing both face-to-face and parasocial contact opportunities within their community.

**Key concepts:**
- Allport's contact hypothesis (1954): the conditions for prejudice reduction
- Aronson, Wilson & Akert's six-point expansion
- Horton & Wohl's parasocial contact hypothesis: "the illusion of face-to-face relationships"
- Schiappa, Gregg & Hewes: parasocial contact through media
- The four frames: brick-and-mortar contact, virtual contact, local stacking, global stacking
- The PFLAG "face replacement": how the advocate's face replaces the stigmatized face in the phenomenological moment of encounter (Dissertation v24)

**Primary sources:** Romanian paper (Figures 10 and 11, contact hypothesis sections); Dissertation v24 (PFLAG testimony model: react, recover, renew)

**Case study:** PFLAG's three-stage testimony model — how a parent's story of reacting to their child's coming out, recovering through education and community, and renewing their commitment to advocacy, creates the conditions for parasocial contact that satisfies Aronson's six criteria.

**Companion reading:** *Confluence* trilogy — chapters where characters use augmented reality and virtual community spaces to create parasocial contact opportunities across geographic and cultural barriers.

**Student exercise:** Design a contact opportunity intervention for two populations in your community that a sustaining institution has kept separated. Specify whether the intervention uses face-to-face contact, parasocial contact, or both. Map your design against Aronson's six conditions. Identify the shared premise that would anchor the encounter. Predict: what is the most likely "deciding moment" response?

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## Part IV: The Juggler

### Unit 10 — Training the Multidisciplinary Advocate

**Core argument:** The Juggler is not a natural leader who emerges spontaneously — the Juggler is a *trained* multidisciplinary advocate with specific, teachable competencies spanning media literacy, communication, sociology, political science, social psychology, information systems, artistic creativity, and public administration. The role requires emotional intelligence (Goleman), dogged determination, and the ability to connect consensus-building groups without claiming hierarchical authority.

**Key concepts:**
- The six skills of the Juggler: Echo Chamber awareness, Empathy, the Disconnect, Campaigns, Missing Activists, Marketable Multimedia
- Goleman's emotional intelligence as the seventh (integrating) trait
- The Juggler as non-hierarchical connector: linking groups without leading them
- The central-figure hypothesis: can trust be earned without hierarchy?
- The collective-thought hypothesis: can the central figure be kept accountable by the structure?
- The capture problem: how elites co-opt charismatic leaders (Farazmand, Selznick)

**Primary sources:** Romanian paper (Figure 7, "The Jugglers," "Breaking Through the Wall of Hegemony"); MOCSIE chapter (Figure 5, juggler role); Dissertation v8 (H4, training activists)

**Case study:** The author's own trajectory — from multimedia journalism student, to Liberty City volunteer, to PFLAG activist, to doctoral candidate, to novelist, to rural Illinois political participant. Analysis of how the Juggler's competencies were acquired sequentially and how they integrate in practice.

**Companion reading:** *Forbidden Friends* — the full autobiographical arc as a case study in Juggler formation. *Confluence* trilogy — character studies of Hugh Lubbert, Esperanza Romero, and Howard Andrews as fictional Jugglers operating in different contexts.

**Student exercise:** Self-assessment against the six Juggler competencies. For each, rate your current skill level (1-5) and identify one concrete action you could take this semester to develop it. Then identify a person in your community who functions as a Juggler (they won't use that term). Interview them about how they connect disparate groups. Do they claim hierarchical authority, or do they connect without leading? How do they resist capture?

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### Unit 11 — Designing the Heterogeneous Policy Network

**Core argument:** The Juggler's ultimate deliverable is not a policy proposal — it is a functioning heterogeneous policy network capable of generating policy proposals continuously. This network must be both effective (innovative, transformational) and efficient (capable of getting proposals through the agenda-setting process). The organizational model uses Thayer's small-group consensus-building architecture: four linked groups of five, with the Juggler at the center, operating without hierarchy.

**Key concepts:**
- Thayer's "almost infinite number of small groups" and the magic number five
- The 18-person organizational model: four linked consensus-building groups
- The media group (six leaders) and the policy group (six leaders)
- The steering group and the Juggler's connecting role
- Follett's Law of the Situation: authority flows from the problem, not the hierarchy
- O'Toole's networked bureaucratic world: "common interest based coalitions"
- Self-funding models: why autonomy from grant-making hierarchies is essential

**Primary sources:** MOCSIE chapter (Figures 1-4, organizational model); Romanian paper (Figure 6, formalizing informal networks); Dissertation v8 (H5, non-hierarchical institution)

**Case study:** Liberty City's twenty community assets — how separately administered programs serving the same population compete for resources instead of collaborating, and what an 18-person inter-organizational network linking them would look like in practice.

**Companion reading:** *Confluence* trilogy — *Soybeans* chapters on how agricultural resistance networks in the Driftless Area organize without hierarchy against corporate consolidation.

**Student exercise:** Identify a neighborhood or community in your area where multiple service providers (government agencies, nonprofits, churches, schools) serve overlapping vulnerable populations. Map the "silos" — which hierarchies do the street-level workers report up? Design an 18-person inter-organizational network that would link them horizontally. Who would be the Juggler? What shared premise would anchor the coalition? What would the first policy proposal be?

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### Unit 12 — From Protest Narrative to Governing Narrative

**Core argument:** Social equity activists never lack for energy. What they lack is the skill and the tools to convert a protest narrative into a governing narrative. A governing narrative is determined by whether the counter-elite's policy proposals become viable (majority-supported) alternatives to the ideas being pushed by the dominant group. The Wall of Hegemony can only be broken through unified, sustained, discourse structuration that finds shared premises across heterogeneous progressive coalitions.

**Key concepts:**
- The Wall of Hegemony (Figure 8): individual hammers vs. collective breakthrough
- Protest narrative vs. governing narrative: the conversion problem
- Kingdon's policy window: when politics, problems, and proposals converge
- The emergent narrative community (Figure 12): finding the shared premise between dialectical positions
- The "glocal" mechanism: how local consensus-building scales globally through shared institutional memory
- Victory defined: not "changed their mind" but "maybe not this time" (Miller)

**Primary sources:** Romanian paper (Figures 8 and 12, conclusion); MOCSIE chapter (conclusion, glocalization); Dissertation v8 (H6, making representative democracy representative)

**Case study:** The 2011 Occupy movement and the Arab Spring — massive protest energy, compelling narratives, global solidarity, but failure to convert protest narratives into governing narratives. Contrasted with the marriage equality movement's successful 15-year conversion of a protest narrative ("gay rights") into a governing narrative ("marriage equality" / "family values").

**Companion reading:** *Confluence* trilogy — *Allegory Protocol* chapters on the transition from resistance to governance, and the dangers of the institutional vacuum that follows when a governing narrative is displaced without a replacement ready.

**Student exercise:** Final project. Select a policy campaign relevant to a vulnerable population in your community. Using the full framework from this course, produce: (1) A one-page structural analysis identifying the sustaining institution, interpretive monopoly, and mobilization of bias mechanism. (2) A displacement strategy with a proposed emergent narrative and shared premise. (3) Three ideographs archived with proper metadata. (4) A contact opportunity design satisfying Aronson's six conditions. (5) An organizational sketch for an 18-person heterogeneous policy network. (6) A one-page reflection connecting your analysis to assigned readings from *Forbidden Friends* or *Confluence*. Present to the class. Discuss.

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## Appendices

### Appendix A — The Discretionary Act Scoring Method
Drawn from Dissertation v24's empirical methodology. The 14 queries, the +2 to -2 scoring system, the three legal constraint classifications (express mandate, express prohibition, silence of the law), and the cultural abidance typology. Provided as a replicable research tool for students.

### Appendix B — The MOCSIE Systems Database Architecture
Drawn from the MOCSIE chapter's Figure 7. The four-tiered drill-down mechanism, the twelve gateway campaigns, the ideograph metadata fields, and the protractor rating algorithm. Provided as a reference for Unit 8.

### Appendix C — Key Theoretical Sources: An Annotated Reading List
Curated bibliography organized by unit, with annotations explaining how each source functions within the textbook's integrated framework. Prioritizes: Miller (2012), Schneider & Ingram (1993), Sandström & Carlsson (2008), Thayer (1973), Geertz (1973), Morgan (2006), Bachrach & Baratz (1962), Baker (2006), Allport (1954), Aronson et al. (2007), Stone (2002), Denhardt (2011), Bourdieu (1977), Gaventa (1980), Hall (1973).

### Appendix D — Companion Text Reading Schedule
A unit-by-unit guide to assigned chapters from *Forbidden Friends* (4th ed.) and the *Confluence* trilogy, with discussion questions that connect the narrative content to the analytical framework.

### Appendix E — The Author's Research Timeline
A chronological overview of the twelve-year research program from which the textbook is drawn, including the TACOLCY Center fieldwork, the FAU doctoral program, the published works, the Romanian conference presentation, and the migration of theoretical ideas into speculative fiction. Provided so that students understand the textbook as a living research program, not a finished product.

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## Notes on Interdisciplinary Program Justification

The textbook draws on and contributes to the following disciplines, supporting credit in any of them:

- **Public Administration / Public Policy** — street-level bureaucracy, administrative discretion, agenda setting, policy networks, governance
- **Political Science** — representative democracy, electoral strategy, interest group politics, state-local relations
- **Communication / Media Studies** — discourse structuration, encoding/decoding, framing, media constructionism
- **Sociology** — social constructionism, institutional theory, hegemony, habitus
- **Social Psychology** — contact hypothesis, parasocial contact, terror management theory, prejudice reduction
- **Information Systems** — ICT design, sociotechnical systems, institutional memory, algorithmic consensus-building
- **Creative Writing / Narrative Studies** — narrative theory, memoir as scholarship, speculative fiction as policy laboratory

The course is designed for upper-division undergraduates or graduate students in public policy, public administration, or related interdisciplinary programs. No prerequisites beyond introductory coursework in any one of the above disciplines.

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*Framework document prepared February 2026. For use in course curriculum proposal to the University of Illinois Springfield, Public Policy program.*