Establishing a Student-Community Book Club for Civic Engagement

Abstract: This paper articulates the reasons and the implementation steps for the forming of a student-community book club that aims to build small communities motivated by Raghuram Rajan’s 2019 book: The Third Pillar: How Markets and the States Leave the Community Behind. We believe humans and societies survive based on rational dialogues. A book club of this type can provide escape valves for individuals holding strong unbendable beliefs on how society should function, which has dichotomized America since 2016. Themes generated from books (fictions or non-fictions) contain scientific or humanistic views can encourage community network building of the type that will broaden people's view, rather than focus on specific disagreements. Disintegration of various factors, according to Rajan, is the crisis that communities all over the world are facing. Building communities have always been some historical endeavors, resulting often from wars and land grabbings. The urgent needs to do so now are due to technological changes. Technologies are disrupting the lifestyles in the world that can amplify as well as compromise disagreements. A web-ground co-development is necessarily for bringing out the goods while managing the bad of technologies.

Keywords: Communities, Students, Book Clubs

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1002266

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