Adjunct Associate Professor
Communication
clundber@email.unc.edu
Chris Lundberg is a founding faculty member of the School of Civic Life and Leadership and a former fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is professor of rhetoric and public culture in the department of communication focused on researching and teaching on the role of speech and listening in civic life and leadership. He has served as a debate coach/theorist, political consultant and a vice provost: In each of those roles he is ultimately an evangelist for fixing our broken civic/democratic conversation by advocating for the liberal philosophical traditions of arguing from both sides and revising opinion on the basis of the better argument. His core conviction is that the future of liberal democracy requires reinvigorating the idea of debate — particularly public speech and public listening — as training for public conversation.
His work on debate as a means of invigorating democratic conversation has spanned from his research and writing on the psychology of public life to designing debate pedagogies for the IDEAs in Action curriculum to crafting the founding concepts for UNC’s Program for Public Discourse to advance a “culture of debate.”
In addition to his scholarly and pedagogical work, he is a seasoned practitioner of applying debate methodologies to public life — from corporate consulting to political work engaging our partisan divide in debate outreach and at the level of local, national and international politics. For more, visit his department of communication faculty profile or his profile at Vocable Communications.