Sociolinguists use the terms everyday and ordinary to align themselves with the traditions of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. Rhetoricians and communication scholars use these words to at least partially reject idealized accounts of political speech in favor of actually existing, local democratic practices. Karen Tracy aligns herself with both camps in her account of how everyday citizens “do” deliberation. She presents interconnected case studies of the deliberations of the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD). She draws on transcripts of school board meetings, newspaper coverage, and first-person interviews collected over a three-year period. She sets forth two goals: to present a detailed account of what local, ordinary political talk looks like and to argue for a measured norm of political communication that she terms reasonable hostility.
The book is divided into nine chapters, with the first two providing a compact introduction to relevant theories of democracy, a summary of the discourse analysis methodologies used and, finally, a brief history of education governance both in the United States generally and in the BVSD specifically. The third chapter begins the analysis with an investigation of how citizens and board members used democracy (both the word and concept) in competing ways. Tracy argues that, although democracy almost always entails competing meanings, its ambiguity makes it an important argumentative resource. Ch. 4 provides an in-depth statistical portrait of citizen participation in school board meetings and details typical strategies for expressing dissent, including emotion and feeling talk, god and devil terms, and references to meeting rules. Ch. 5 examines the role of local media in instigating and sustaining political discussion. Ch. 6 is an account of a board reelection campaign that assesses the function of platitudes and personal attacks. Tracy's analysis in this chapter is unusual in that it envisions potentially positive aspects of what are traditionally seen as negative campaigning tactics. Ch. 7 examines wording disputes in a controversy surrounding the district's diversity policy. Tracy shows how multiple frames can be used to make sense of disagreements at the level of policy wording. Ch. 8 offers a close-up view of a single board meeting and six lessons that can be drawn from it.
In the ninth and final chapter, Tracy argues that conflict is essential to local democratic practice and proposes a norm of reasonable hostility to help clarify the limited value of civility and “niceness” as overarching political ideals. She describes reasonable hostility as “emotionally marked, critical commentary about another's action that matches the perceived wrong to which it responds” (203). Reasonable hostility is face threatening, but that threat is moderated by micro-level discourse practices and situational norms of conduct. Readers may find reasonable hostility somewhat underelaborated as a communicative ideal; however, it functions well as an argument for the value of conflict in ordinary democracy. Overall, Tracy's account is strong. It relies on multiple, rich sources of data and does not merely theorize on what discourse choices might mean, but also seeks participants' understanding of why they made those choices.
