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Matthew D. Nelsen, "The Color of Civics: Civic Education for a Multiracial Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, this is Lily Gorn with the New Books Network. The New Books in Political Science podcast. Today I'm joined by Matthew Nelson, who is the author of the Colors of Civic Education for a Multiracial Democracy. This book was published in paper form in 2023 and has an audio edition that was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. I'd like to welcome Matt to the New Books in Political Science podcast and ask him to tell us a little bit about himself and how he came to this particular project. Hello, Matt.
- [01:42]
C
Hello. Thank you so much for having me. I came to study civic education through my own experiences as a classroom teacher. Right out of undergrad, I became a fifth grade all content teacher in San Antonio, Texas within the San Antonio Independent School district. And my first year of teaching was during the 2012 presidential election. And I was provided with a very beautifully written, optimistic social studies curriculum about how when we participate in politics, elected officials listen and thereby respond to our needs. And even for the 10 and 11 year olds in my classroom, majority of whom were Latino and African American, they were giving me this look like, this is not how politics works, at least not for us within our neighborhood. And through them I learned that despite all of the headlines about young people being politically apathetic and having low rates of Political participation, that the young people in my classroom were incredibly politically knowledgeable about issues that were pertinent to their lives, including immigration, housing. And we were writing curricula from the top down, Rather than starting with the knowledge that young people already possessed. And by listening to them and by reconsidering how it was that I taught social studies, I started to become very curious and the role of social studies education within processes of political socialization. I know for me, my social studies courses were quite formative. And, you know, as a classroom teacher, it became the impetus to eventually devoting my life to studying civic education and specifically how to reimagine what civic education actually should entail.
- [03:45]
B
And so I'm going to start right there, because not everybody who might be listening to this has a total grasp of what civic education is. I know as political scientists, we do talk about this a lot, and I at least try to implement it in my classes. But when we talk about this concept, what is civic education?
- [04:10]
C
Yes, that's a fantastic question. So even though it's a book about reimagining civic education, when people ask me for the definition, I go back to 1934 with how Charles Merriam defined civic education. He described it as any course that attempts to prepare individuals for full participation in public life. Oftentimes we add a degree of specificity to that to say that these are courses that build democratic capacity, that is, the knowledge, the attitudes, the skills, and the behaviors that allow people to participate in politics. Historically, these courses have been social studies courses where these knowledge sets, skill sets, are explicitly taught. But theoretically, any course could be considered a civic education course if the content is. Is linked to developing that democratic capacity, that skill set, the knowledge set that makes it easier for people to participate in politics.
- [05:15]
B
And so we talk about the fact that in the United States we have. And this is where you spend a lot of the book, talking about the public school systems themselves As a place where this happens, either consciously or unconsciously. Can you talk a little bit about how we position and understand civic education happening in American schools?
- [05:45]
C
Yes. So much of the existing research that looks at the way in which schools shape the political dispositions of young people actually doesn't look very much at coarse content. Back in 1968, political scientists Langton and Jennings concluded that social studies content had zero impact on student incomes. And it kind of relegated the study of content to the sidelines for several decades. I will note there is a very interesting finding in a footnote of that work, where the course is. The course content actually was quite meaningful for black and socioeconomically disadvantaged students, but 1968, I think that that finding was perhaps less important to these. To these authors. So rather than studying content, political scientists oftentimes look at the broader civic culture or ethos of a school and how that shapes their political dispositions. So we know from individuals like David Campbell and in education, Diana Hess, that schools defined by open climates, where young people are encouraged to talk about politics, encouraged to say when they perceive school rules are unfair or unjust, these young people tend to be more politically knowledgeable, and they tend to be more likely to vote later on in adulthood. So in a very Deweyan sense, these schools with a strong civic ethos, allow young people to just practice democracy day in, day out by asking questions of their teachers and authority figures. And we also know, contrastingly, not only from political scientists, but sociologists and. And theorist as well, that, you know, schools defined by these authoritarian relationships where, say, young people are forced to stand in line or have uniform checks or are going through a metal detector while entering school, young people who experience schools of that kind tend to be more distrusting of authority figures, political institutions. They also tend to be less likely to participate in politics as adults. And I will note that these findings are most pronounced among young people of color and black girls in particular. So much of how the social sciences has examined how schools shape democratic outcomes has been the broader environment of a school rather than the specific mechanisms of instruction, and at the classroom level, which is what I try to take on explicitly in this book.
- [08:30]
B
And so the book itself, you are going through, and you wrote this while. Or you worked on this while you were at Northwestern. So you're specifically focusing on Chicago and environs and the schools therein. And you sort of do a multimethod analysis of trying to get at both what's going on inside social studies classrooms, but also trying to figure out who's learning. What can you talk about? You know, essentially we'll get to the sort of structure of the book in a moment, but essentially that broader picture, right?
- [09:16]
C
So in terms of who's learning what, traditional civic education courses, the ones that many of us have been socialized within, focus on a few key topics. The first are Great American Heroes, which overwhelmingly tend to be men, tend to be white men, tend to focus on very formal institutional processes, such as how a bill becomes law. And we also learn a lot about the three branches of government and checks and balances. So overwhelmingly, even in a school district like Chicago Public Schools, which is incredibly diverse, not only racially and ethnically, but also in terms of class and national origin group. Even still, the majority of young people enrolled in Chicago public schools and the surrounding suburbs are still engaging in this traditional civic education content. That said, and something I highlight in the book is there are these truly exceptional social studies teachers that in a very clever, subversive, but also standards aligned way, are pushing the boundaries of civic education. They're teaching about great American heroes, but they're also looping in individuals from marginalized backgrounds. They're talking about heroes from the perspective of movements and collective action rather than exceptional individuals. They're talking about how political processes should theoretically work, but they're also talking about the historical moments in which movements and individuals have had to exert extra systemic political actions in order to ensure that those political processes are working. So I'd say the traditional approach to civic education that the majority of students are learning is a romantic one. It's an idealized one. And these social studies teachers who are teaching in a different way are acknowledging that these processes don't always work, particularly for individuals at the margins. And thus it is also an important component of civic education to learn what we do when systems and institutions stop working.
- [11:40]
B
And so I wanted to sort of move on and talk a bit about, you know, sort of how you started to dig into your research, because it is a complex study that you do, because you do surveys and you do experiments and you do interviews and you interview students and you interview teachers and you interview principals. And so what were you trying to set up in terms of gathering this information from so many different sources? Because you do talk about, there are some of these exceptional teachers who are able to sort of broaden beyond the romanticized notion of, you know, I'm just teaching the Republic right now. And so I'm talking about the noble lie. And so I ask my students always like, does the United States have a noble lie? And I'm not saying that any of the traditional approaches are necessarily per se, a noble lie, but that there's a lot more going on. And so before you concluded the research, you needed to sort of start out, like, what were you trying to out figure figure out as you sort of ramped up the different approaches that you were using to accumulate the information.
- [13:06]
C
That's right. So the first thing I want to say to provide a bit of context for this work is I started studying this topic while pursuing a master's degree in 2014 and 2015. The majority of the research in the book was completed between 2017. And just as the COVID 19 pandemic was wrapping up, or ramping up rather. And the discussion, the politicization of debates over school content, the critical race theory debate, hadn't quite begun yet. So I was initially starting with this question of does content matter within processes of political socialization? The existing research suggested that it did not. My experiences in the classroom, my own experiences as a student, suggested that it did. And I first wanted to take on the causal question of maybe certain types of content do matter. And given that the question I was initially posing was a causal one, I started with designing the experiment. I think now, in retrospect, I may have approached the structure of the book and the methods employed with the timeline. I think they may have looked different. But for the sake of transparency, my starting point was the question of does a certain type of civic education content contribute to greater intended political participation, specifically among marginalized youth? And from there, once that relationship was confirmed, it then became, okay, let's fill out the picture here. Under what environmental circumstances do these findings apply? Who are the teachers that are teaching this way? And what are the institutional structures at these schools that allow these teachers to be creative with the implementation of content?
- [15:20]
B
And so part of what you found is that there are these structures, obviously of curricula that are to be taught. This is the case across many different states in many different ways. And that the end product, of course, is for students to understand essentially American history and their place in it and their role as a citizen, shall we say. But what you found was that again, a lot of the teaching that you also experienced was not necessarily inclusive of a variety of voices, and students were disaffected by it. And so as you sort of were digging into more of this research, can you explain a bit about, you know, sort of some of these conundrums that you were sort of seeing across different schools and different capacities?
- [16:24]
C
Yes, absolutely. So a top line finding is that when young people engage with historical content that emphasizes not only the contributions of racially marginalized individuals, but also collective action among black and Latino youth included in the studies, they become significantly more likely to say that they're going to participate in multiple ways. So not only voting when they turn 18, not only contributing to a political campaign, but they also say that they're more likely to protest and participate in boycotts and boycotts. And when you start to peel back the layers any a bit more, I started to see that there's also an environmental component to this as well, a classroom climate component to this, whereby it was only the students who had not engaged in content of this kind of before that we saw the major effects. So in other words, some political scientists would call this a compensation effect. If you have learned this history before, if you're reading about it, you're not going to be super shocked by it. It's not going to significantly alter how it is you participate or may participate in the political process. But rather it's among young people who hadn't learned this information before, where the shock that comes from learning history from a different perspective kind of creates this in the moment response of I'm angry or I'm empowered or it was an injustice that I didn't know this. And at least in that moment, these individuals become more likely to say that, yeah, I'm going to participate in politics in multiple ways. And I think that finding is really critical, especially for people who study political socialization, which I will, I will add socialization studies are held to an incredibly high methodological standard where they have to show both causality and the longevity of the effects. But what I'm trying to do in this book too is to also draw from what we know from social movements to say that a moment can also matter within processes of political socialization. The moment that these young people read in a historical account that elicits a strong emotion that in the moment can become an impetus to take political action, that doesn't necessarily necessitate that we know the long term implications. We know from the social movements literature that individuals are oftentimes moved into action, as Hari Hahn so eloquently describes.
- [19:20]
B
And so what you ultimately are sort of digging into in the research and what you found was not only that you have sort of concluded that if students learn essentially more diverse perspectives and more diverse understandings of American history, because that's what we're talking about here, that that is likely going to have a more significant result on their. The longevity of their engagement in politics. And you found this in different ways for different racial groups of students. Can you talk about, like, what you saw in terms of these different groups of students?
- [20:12]
C
Yes. So among Latino American students, I found that engaging in this more critical content that emphasizes, you know, the contributions of marginalized groups, that places greater emphasis on collective action, that among Latinos they became significantly more likely to say that they wanted to participate in multiple forms of politics, from more traditional intention to vote, intention to volunteer on a campaign, but also a greater intention to pursue nonpartisan civic engagement activities, more likely to talk with family members and friends about politics, and also to say that they would participate in political activism. And across each of these participatory domains, the effects were most pronounced among Latino students. For African American students, we saw the greatest movement in the public voice domain, so the political activism domain. And for Asian American students, interestingly, I essentially had null findings where among Asian Americans, they were neither more or less likely to say that they were going to participate in politics across any of the experimental conditions, the content conditions. And I dug into this a bit more using focus groups with 30 high school students within Chicago Public schools. So when designing the experiment, I tried to select historical moments that highlighted the activism of national origin groups that are particularly prevalent in Chicago. So among Latinos in Chicago, there's a high concentration of Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans. And thus I selected passages that focused on Mexican American social movements. And among Asian Americans in Chicago, the most prevalent national origin group is Chinese Americans. So many of the passages highlighting, you know, AAPI activism focused predominantly on Chinese Americans. But what was interesting among the students who actually participated in the study, it was much more heterogeneous in terms of Asian American students involved a ton of South Asian students, a lot of Vietnamese students, a lot of Japanese and Korean students. So in focus groups, when I was trying to dig into this null finding of why this content didn't appear to matter to Asian American students, they're just like, I'm not Chinese American. Thus, learning about Chinese Americans is. Is interesting to me, but it's not necessarily politically empowering, which I think. Which I think makes a lot of sense. And it's certainly something that, you know, individuals interested in reimagining civic education, social studies education, definitely need to think about and theorize about national origin and how that plays into. Into these dynamics. And I also want to. To note that white students also benefit from content of this kind. Now, there is this narrative that racially inclusive school content, whether it's in social studies or in other content areas, makes white students feel bad about themselves. At least that's what, you know, organizations like Moms for Liberty would. Would claim. But both in my work and also decades of ethnic studies scholarship demonstrates that these courses also have incredibly meaningful impacts for white students as well. So what I see in my work is when young people read more inclusive historical content, they become significantly more likely to say that they acknowledge the contributions of other racial and ethnic groups to American democracy, which I think is incredibly important at this juncture. Thinking back to January 6, all the way back up to the. The re election of Donald Trump, I think part of why we are here is a lack of acknowledgment of all of the ways in which differently positioned people have contributed to American democracy. And thus I think this empathy component that I saw among white students is also a key finding as we think about how social studies courses can help prepare future generations for multiracial democracy. The holidays have arrived at the Home Depot and we're here to help bring the excitement with decor for every part of your home. Check out our wide assortment of easy to assemble pre lit trees so you can spend less time setting up and more time celebrating. And bring your holiday spirit outdoors with unique decor like one of our Santa inflatables. Whatever your style, find the right pieces at the right prices this holiday season at the Home Depot.
- [25:21]
B
And I mean, a lot of what we're really talking about here is this concept of multiracial democracy, which seems to be very difficult in many ways. And part of what you are talking about, about in the book is you're finding all of this information about, you know, if we reimagine your words, civic education, that we may well produce much stronger citizenship. And so my next question for you is, what is the reimagining? How can political scientists, how can school teachers, how can people in education research? How can we consider what we're doing in terms of reimagining?
- [26:16]
C
That's a great question and something that I really try to dig into in the first two chapters of the book. And I think this is two pronged. We first need to reconsider the outcomes that we care about. So as we consider how we measure the effectiveness of not only K through 12 social studies courses, but I also think political science courses at the university level, I think we need to think critically about the knowledge, skills and behaviors that we want young people to possess. Right now, the way in which we oftentimes measure the effects of civic learning initiatives is by drawing from, you know, the Verba, Schlossman and Brady civic volunteerism model, which to be clear, I think is wonderful and incredibly useful. But I think it's over emphasized certain attitudes and behaviors. So that model places a lot of emphasis on intent to vote. It places a lot of emphasis on the belief in the responsiveness of government, trust in government. And I'm skeptical that those outcomes are sufficient for bringing out a multiracial democracy. And I want to talk a little bit about why that is the case. So in terms of voting intention, we live in an incredibly diverse country with a lot of immigrants, many of those individuals, and I will note we have a lot of immigrant children who are Constitutionally protected, who have access to a public education, who will not be able to vote even when they reach voting age. So we need to think about how is it that individuals who lack access to that institutionalized form of political action, how can they also participate within the political process? How is it that we should account for the success of civic education for individuals who do not have the right to vote? But also how do we account for feelings of political empowerment, political engagement for young people who reside within communities where it's actually quite costly to vote? Costly in terms of time, if you're waiting in line in a neighborhood where a bunch of polling locations have closed in the past few days, time consuming in terms of the time it takes to gather the political information needed in order to make an informed decision about who to vote for. But also we need to be thinking about how do individuals participate if they don't believe in the efficacy of electoral politics? And I think that's really, really important to consider. We have large subsets of Americans who, for good reason, do not trust these processes because these processes have been made incredibly difficult for them. So with that, I think we need to consider a broader array of quote, unquote, desirable political outcomes. So do our students know how to take political action if they don't perceive electoral politics to be the most efficacious voters way for them to make their voices heard? I think that's an incredibly important question for us to ask, both at the K through 12 level and also in higher education. And then in terms of these attitudes that oftentimes are used to gauge the success of civic education, trust and efficacy. We're hearing a lot about brainwashing children in contemporary American politics. And to me, treating trust in government and the belief that we should believe government will respond to our needs is the epitome of that concern about brainwashing. I do not think the role of civic education at k through 12 or in higher education should be to convince young people to trust government. To me, that is a scary political motivation. But rather, maybe we should be measuring attitudes that get at whether people feel like they are able to participate or want to participate, even if they don't believe in the responsiveness of government or perhaps, maybe even skepticism of government is a desirable political outcome, perhaps now more than ever. So that's, you know, the reimagining component in terms of how we think about outcomes. But I also think we need to reimagine, you know, the things that we do in the classroom. So the things that I talk about in the book are not only, you know, thinking about content, making it more racially inclusive, more inclusive of women, but also talking about movements rather than individuals. You will be hard pressed to find a high school student who, you know, reads about Martin Luther King Jr. And then walks away from the course thinking that they too will become Martin Luther King. The way in which we talk about these historical figures is oftentimes so exceptional and so godlike that most individuals don't read those accounts and think I too can achieve the same. But pivoting to think about movements and collective action provides a window for students to see everyday people get involved in politics. And it is those everyday people who are the true mechanism of change. And, you know, existing research also gives us a lot of great insights about what classrooms should look like to foster political empowerment. They shouldn't necessarily be lecture based spaces, they should be discussion based. Democracy is a process. It's about listening to different points of view. It's about debate, it's about embracing tensions, leaning into conundrums. So I think much of the existing literature that emphasizes, you know, open classrooms where young people are given the opportunity to talk about politics, that, combined with this more critical content, can help, you know, develop some of these political outcomes that I previously discussed.
- [32:45]
B
And one of the other things that you talk about, because you do talk a lot about, like the physical space that the students are in in a classroom and that democracy itself is kind of a messy undertaking. And so that may look messy in a classroom because it's not everybody lined up in their desks with their pencils in their hands writing things down, but that you also talk about, you know, sort of the position of the school itself, the physical building of the school in the neighborhood, and how teachers have been able to sort of capitalize on that position and the neighborhood in which they are in. But also that because of school closings and other budget constraints, that some of this is very attenuated. Can you talk about why the physical space of the school building is important and also what the problems may be that we're now facing around that as well?
- [33:49]
C
Right. So schools both symbolically and quite literally are at the heart of communities. They oftentimes are along the bustling thoroughfare of a neighborhood. They're oftentimes positioned alongside a major park. They're oftentimes positioned to be a site not only of formal education, but these are places that are also polling stations. There are places that host recreational sports and book clubs. They're truly community gathering spaces. And some of the teachers that I spoke about those who are truly reimagining what civic education can be, feel a strong connection to the neighborhood in which they teach. And part of how that attitude is developed is these teachers are oftentimes really enmeshed into the civic infrastructure of a neighborhood. They're tapped into local political groups, they're tapping into local museums and art galleries that they're using to inform their teaching, to provide quick school trips from the school building across the street to a local exhibit. And they're using that to inform their instruction and to make their instruction incredibly place based. And it is among teachers who I see are really connected to external community organizations that are teaching in truly innovative ways. And these also tend to be the teachers who also, you know, in attitudinal questions on surveys are saying that they feel really connected to the neighborhood that they live in. So we see almost this symbiotic relationship of they're using the location of the school as a heart of the community, as a jumping off point, to build connections that inform their practice as as educators.
- [35:58]
B
And so I also wanted to ask you, because you note this in the acknowledgments, the COVID of your book was done by a local artist, a local Chicago artist who's also an educator. And it is of a school building upside down, but with multicolored arms coming out of it. Can you just quickly talk about the COVID art for your book, which is a really beautiful piece of art?
- [36:29]
C
Absolutely. So during the writing of this book, I was working as a adjunct professor of political science at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This was the height of the COVID 19 pandemic. So all of the instruction was online. But in the process, I got to know some incredibly talented artists and incredibly talented artists who really pushed the ways in which I think about politics. You know, now at the University of Miami, I'm teaching a lot of students who are majoring in political science because they want to work in government, they want to become lawyers. When I was working at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, this was a general ed requirement. And my students were far to the political left of the ideological spectrum than I was. And it was some of the most dynamic conversations about politics that I had ever experienced. And many of my students are Chicago natives, are products of Chicago public schools who had insightful things to say every week. But the week's focusing on local politics, local education politics. I felt like the dynamics of the conversation really came alive. And it was during those moments where I was also finishing the initial draft of the manuscript. And I was thinking about how meaningful it would be to have one of these artists capture the sentiments in the book and the way that perhaps a university press couldn't quite achieve. So I enlisted the help of David Flores, who's a fantastic street artist here in Chicago. I gave him the first chapter of the book as well as the conclusion. And I just asked him to initially have a conversation with me of what he was taking from the text and how he would translate in that. Translate that into art. And it truly was like a therapy session for me where he was like, I hear you talking about civic education. That is maybe something that is black and white and a little dull. And what you're advocating for is transforming that dullness into vibrant color. And that was really illuminating for me, and I encouraged him to run with it. He put together three different prints for the COVID of the book. All three of them went to the press as something that I would like to see on the COVID And the press ended up picking my favorite version as well, which is the one that we. That we see. So while one should never judge a book by its cover, I feel like David has done an incredibly good job at enticing individuals to potentially ordering this book just because the COVID of it is better than I ever could have imagined.
- [39:32]
B
The COVID is awesome. So kudos to David and to you for sort of coming up with that in Oxford for running with it. I did have a question for you as we're sort of concluding our conversation, because the focus of your research really was the diversity of the Chicago school district, the Chicago public school district itself, itself, not just like the people, but the neighborhoods and the areas and so on. And part of what isn't in the conversation is civic education in more rural settings. So can you talk a little bit about how part of what you're looking at may or may not translate into rural school districts or rural areas where, again, you have far fewer students, you have perhaps less diversity of the kind you would have in Chicago, but you still have different diversity and sort of what that may hold.
- [40:38]
C
Such an important question and something that I puzzle over truly on a daily basis, especially as someone who is also, you know, and secondary research agendas. Also, I'm interested in ideas of rural consciousness and the. The relationship between rural consciousness and. And white identity so broadly defined. I view this book as a framework that can be applied in different context. I'm very careful to say that I don't think what works in Chicago will work everywhere and not even work in all cities, but Rather, we need to be place based in our educational approaches. So in New York City or in Miami, you know, the national origin groups that we incorporate into the narratives are going to look very different from Chicago. But the question you raise becomes more difficult. This question of how do we go about teaching in a way that is politically meaningful, politically empowering, works towards the goal of multiracial democracy, while also acknowledging that demographically, ideologically, these are very distinct places. One thing that I think a lot about and a major inspiration of this book is looking at how social movements throughout US History, but also the history of Brazil, for example, have really reinvented how it is, I think, about civic education. Many of the lessons that I'm advocating for in terms of K through 12 civic education are lessons that have already been learned within social movements. And thinking about, for example, the American Civil Rights movement, the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, rural Tennessee, played a major role in bridging cross racial divides between poor blacks and poor whites. And that was a major inspiration for the writing of this book. But one thing I'm trying to think about moving forward is now in 2025, where the rural urban divide is so stark in the United States, is whether the framework of the Highlander Folk School, bridging racial divides by leaning into a common class consciousness, whether that can help, you know, work us towards the goal of a multiracial democracy. When thinking about rural America, that is a project that I want to take on probably in another book format. And I'm now in the early stages of looking towards the both historical and contemporary examples of the organizations that are doing this work. What I argue for civic education and the color of civics is really an argument born out of the civil rights movement, the ethnic studies movement. And similarly, I am now in the early stages of trying to identify the spaces, the organizers, that are already effectively doing this work in rural America to begin the process of considering how that could scale up into instruction in K through 12 classrooms. I think it's incredibly important. White folks in rural America, people of color, and rural America experience marginalization that also needs to be accounted for within these. With these narratives. And also just for the broader health of K12 education in the United States, it's much needed for rural Americans to feel as if these are meaningful spaces and these referring to traditional public schools.
- [44:25]
B
So I don't have to ask you what you're working on next, because you just explained it to me, which I appreciate. And I was wondering if the next thing was to be sort of looking at the same sort of ideas, but in a rural setting as opposed to sort of an urban or suburban setting that you look at in the Color of Civics. So with that, I hope you will join me when that book comes out and we can talk about it. And I want to thank Matthew Nelson for discussing the Color of Civics, Civic Education for a Multiracial Democracy with me today. This book was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press and it also has an audio format that also was published by Oxford University Press. Is there a brick and mortar store with an online presence where somebody can find your book?
- [45:20]
C
Yes, if it's okay. I will list several in Miami, Florida, Books and Books, which has a location in both Coral Gables and Coconut Grove, and in Chicago, the Seminary Co Op Bookstore in Hyde park right on the University of Chicago campus, as well as Women and Children first in Andersonville and Chicago.
- [45:44]
B
All right. I will put links to all three of those in the show notes for today's podcast. And Matthew, thank you for joining me today.
- [45:54]
C
Thank you so much for having me.
- [45:55]
B
It's my pleasure.