Joni Doherty

Joni Doherty is director of the New England Center for Civic Life at Franklin Pierce University, where she also teaches in the American Studies Program. The Center’s current major initiatives include The Diversity and Community Project, designed to improve communication across differences on college campuses, especially in areas of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, and the Pierce Seminar on Business and Ethics, which assists business and civic leaders to develop a “living code” of ethics, defined as a series of decisions—large and small—made throughout the working day within a milieu that includes not only colleagues and clients, but also the community.

Doherty is editor for the College Issues Forums Series of discussion guides, which present topics that range from those especially important to college-age students to society-wide issues. She has been instrumental in a number of community-based projects including Rindge 2020: The Challenges of Growth, a three-year town/gown collaboration that addressed economic growth, development, and land use; Divided We Fail, which consisted of 30 deliberative forums on health care and financial security held across the state, and New Hampshire Civic Connection: A Quality Education, an initiative that engaged 22 communities in deliberations on the quality of education.

Doherty’s essays have been published in Deliberation and the Work of Higher Education: Innovations for the Classroom, the Campus, and the Community and First-Year Civic Engagement: Sound Foundations for College, Citizenship and Democracy. She is co-author of "Public Scholarship on a Liberal Arts Campus," which appeared in the Higher Education Exchange. Doherty earned a master’s degree in Gender/Cultural Studies from Simmons College and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Philosophy, Aesthetics and Visual Studies Program at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.