The New State is the idea of Brandon Ching, a PhD student in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University.  He is one of twelve students that make up a diverse cohort in ASU’s public administration PhD program.  This diversity can be seen in our professions: an executive director of a major non-profit and an attorney; a retired public servant; academicians; a therapist and now project manager; IT professionals; and policy researchers.   Equally diverse are our life stories: we are parents, siblings, spouses, children, and friends who hail from Pakistan, South Korea, and the Northeast, West, Northwest, Southwest, Southeast, and the Midwestern United States.  Some of us make six figure salaries and some of us are below the poverty line.  Some of us are idealists, some functionalists, and some see no difference.

This diversity is common in the United States. Diversity and commonality are not opposites; they are a binary that we can find in all human relations whether in our selves, in our cohorts and families, or in our communities and nation.  Commonality is a bond that pulls us together.  It allows us to communicate and to be empathetic: Commonality opens us to the possibility of having relationships.  Diversity is a repelling force that pushes us into our own uniqueness.  The binary of diversity and commonality opens the possibility of having relationships that are limited only by our own imaginations.

The commonality that bonds us is not only being in a cohort and sharing an educational experience, but a passion for the public sector and a belief that government can make a positive difference in people’s lives.  It is our diversity – from functionalism to post-structuralism, from conservative to liberal, Christian to Muslim to atheist, from young to not so young – which opens the possibilities of our discourse. Our diversity allows us to imagine new ways of governance that open and strengthen human experience and at the same time preserve methods that work, and tinker and tweak that which has unrealized potential.

Brandon’s idea for this site was to use the digital reality in which we are embedded and our diversity and common interest in public administration to lure members of the field into a discourse that isn’t limited to the institutions of academia or government, nor by expertise or imagination. The only limitation of the ideas on this site is our own willingness to participate in a discourse of what we want our future to be and how to beckon the present to that new state.

The name and inspiration for this site originate from a 1918 book by Mary Parker Follett, The New State. In this book, Follett announced the failure of representative democracy and proposed the adoption of a direct democracy that depended on an active, informed and diverse citizenry. Follett’s optimism and democratic ideals were fairly well received at the time, but the decline of the Progressive movement and its ideals caused Follett’s vision to be set aside and forgotten. The recent republication of the work has sparked new interest in her ideas, and the new tenor and tone of politics in the United States reflect the democratic values that Follett so cherished.

Our cohort has been inspired by Follett’s ideas and words. We hope that you will join us.

Copyright

Though we do not believe that individuals should financially profit by  The New State, we acknowledge the significance of ones own work.  All original work on The New State is protected under creative commons copyright that allows for individuals to use our work, if full citation and credit is given to original authors.  In addition this copyright prohibits the use of The New State content for commercial use.

Plagiarism is not tolerated.  The improper use of any material that is not the author’s will result in the termination of that author’s account and the deletion of their content on The New State.

If a professional paper is inspired, or constructed, through your contributions to The New State, please give props to this site for creating a space for such an idea to emerge.  We are always looking to increase the base of the site.

The New State by thenewstate.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.