On January 14 we are proud to partner with the Missouri Humanities Council to co-promote a virtual author event featuring Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, co-authors of The Upswing: How American Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.
In this new book, Putnam and Garrett examine deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; and a fraying social fabric. They will share lessons of community building from an earlier era and propose strategies that will help ‘Middle America’ meet in the middle.
We will be providing a link to this event shortly. In the meantime, please make a note in your calendars for what will be an important and fascinating talk.
This event is part of a larger initiative called: ‘Why it Matters: Uniting a Polarized Nation’. In four varied activities, Missouri Humanities participants will consider the impact of ideological polarization in America. Our nation’s social fabric is torn by partisan distrust, disinformation, exclusion, and coarsened public discourse. Our ties to one another have become perilously fragile and Americans are more divided than ever, gridlocked over social issues, race, health, and the economy. In this series, Missouri Humanities (MH) will explore what divides us, how ideological polarization has made its mark on American history, and its continued impact on the health of our democracy. MH will leverage its reach to address the many layers of ideological polarization and approach the issue on personal, community, historical, and societal levels with our virtual audience in rural, urban, and suburban communities across the ‘Show Me’ state.
Robert D. Putnam is the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, having retired from active teaching in May 2018. Raised in a small town in Ohio, he was educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2006 Putnam received the Skytte Prize, the world's highest accolade for a political scientist, in 2013 President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities, for "deepening our understanding of community in America,” and in 2018 the International Political Science Association awarded him the Karl Deutsch Award for cross-disciplinary research. He has received eighteen honorary degrees from universities in eight countries, including in 2018, Oxford.
Shaylyn Romney Garrett is a writer and social entrepreneur who has dedicated her life to the pursuit of connection, community, and healing in an increasingly fragmented world.
She is the co-author with Robert D. Putnam of The Upswing: How America Came Together A Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (Simon & Schuster 2020). Her work also includes the uniquely revealing portraits of religious communities across the United States published in the award-winning book, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2011). She is a founding contributor to the Aspen Institute’s initiative, Weave: The Social Fabric Project, and writes about her personal journey back to community on her blog, Project Reconnect.
Shaylyn has also had a successful career as a social entrepreneur. With her husband, James Garrett, she co-founded Think Unlimited, a venture working to catalyze social innovation in the Middle East. She lived in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan for six years while building Think Unlimited, and partnered with Queen Rania Al-Abdullah to bring experiential learning to Jordanian public schools.
Shaylyn’s work (including an original Arabic language curriculum on creativity and critical thinking—one of the very first ever developed in the region) has been featured by the New York Times, FastCompany, LinkedIn, Harvard Business Review, and Arab Investor. In 2011 she was honored with the prestigious Draper Richards Kaplan Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship, and was a finalist in the global Echoing Green Competition. She was twice awarded a membership to the Clinton Global Initiative, and has been a speaker at TEDx.
Shaylyn holds a BA magna cum laude in Government from Harvard University, and is a returned Peace Corps volunteer. She is also a certified Holistic Health Coach, as well as a permaculturalist who loves to get her hands in the dirt, and thinks a lot about healthy soils as a model for thriving human communities. She lives in the beautiful red rock desert of Southern Utah with her husband, her seven year-old daughter, Sophie, her infant son, Aeon, and her loyal dog Dewey (named after one of her favorite philosophers!)
