Rage and Reason: Democracy Under the Tyranny of Social Media

Roger Berkowitz

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. A Professor of Politics, Philosophy,  and Human Rights, Berkowitz writes and speaks about how justice is made present in the world.   VIEW MORE >>

Leon Botstein

Leon Botstein has been the President of Bard College since 1975, where he is also the Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities. He is chairperson of the board of the Central European University and chancellor of the Open Society University Network (OSUN), as well as a member of the Global Board of the Open Society Foundation. 

He is also music director and principal conductor of The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and the American Symphony Orchestra, artistic co-director of the Bard Music Festival. Botstein is editor of The Musical Quarterly and writes on music and culture.  VIEW MORE >>

Myisha Cherry

Myisha Cherry is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. Her research is primarily concerned with the role of emotions and attitudes in public life. Her latest book is The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-racist Struggle. Cherry’s books include UnMuted: Conversations on Prejudice, Oppression, and Social Justice (Oxford University Press) and, co-edited with Owen Flanagan, The Moral Psychology of Anger (Rowman & Littlefield). Her work on emotions and race has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Huffington Post, WomanKind, and New Philosopher Magazine. Cherry is also the host of the UnMute Podcast, where she interviews philosophers about the social and political issues of our day. 

Frances Haugen

Frances Haugen is an advocate for accountability & transparency in social media. Born in Iowa City, Iowa, Frances Haugen is the daughter of two professors and grew up attending the Iowa caucuses with her parents, instilling a strong sense of pride in democracy and responsibility for civic participation. Frances holds a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin College and a MBA from Harvard University. She is a specialist in algorithmic product management, having worked on ranking algorithms at Google, Pinterest, Yelp and Facebook. In 2019, she was recruited to Facebook to be the lead Product Manager on the Civic Misinformation team, which dealt with issues related to democracy and misinformation, and later also worked on counter-espionage. During her time at Facebook, Frances became increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes prioritizing their own profits over public safety and putting people's lives at risk. As a last resort and at great personal risk, Frances made the courageous decision to blow the whistle on Facebook. The initial reporting was done by the Wall Street Journal in what became known as “The Facebook Files”.   VIEW MORE >>

Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times.  VIEW MORE >>

Pankaj Mishra 

Pankaj Mishra is the author of Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West (2012), and Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), among numerous other works. In 2009, he was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2014, he received Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize.   VIEW MORE >>

Uday Mehta

Uday Singh Mehta is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and the 2022 Yehuda Elkana Fellow (awarded by Central European University and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College). Professor Mehta has taught at several universities, including Princeton, Cornell, MIT, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Hull and Amherst College. He is the author of The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke(Cornell University Press, 1992) and Liberalism and Empire, (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Liberalism and Empire was awarded the J. David Greenstone prize for the best book in Political Theory by the American Political Science Association in 2002. In 2003, Mehta was one of ten recipients of the prestigious “Carnegie Scholars” prize given to “scholars of exceptional creativity.” His forthcoming book is titled A Different Vision: Gandhi’s Critique of Political Rationality.

Suzanne Nossel

Suzanne Nossel is Chief Executive Officer at PEN America and author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All. Prior to joining PEN America, she served as the Chief Operating Officer of Human Rights Watch and as Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. She has served in the Obama Administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International
Organizations, leading US engagement in the UN and multilateral institutions on human right issues, and in the Clinton Administration as Deputy to the US Ambassador for UN Management and Reform. Nossel coined the term “Smart Power,” which was the title of a 2004 article she published in Foreign Affairs Magazine and later became the theme of Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton’s tenure in office. She is a featured columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and has published op-eds in The New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times, as well as scholarly articles in Foreign Affairs, Dissent, and Democracy, among others. Nossel is a member of the Oversight Board, an international body that oversees content moderation on social media. She is a former senior fellow at the Century Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Nossel is a magna cum laude graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Dylan Sparks

I was born in South Africa and lived there until I was 7, before living in Qatar and Hong Kong. I attended the UWC of South East Asia - East Campus in Singapore where I was a South African National Committee scholar. I graduated from UWCSEA in 2014. While at UWC I was part of planning an Initiative for Peace conference in Sri Lanka where we facilitated a conflict resolution conference for Sri Lankan youth from Tamil, Sinhalese and Muslim backgrounds. After undergoing training workshops from regional UN workers, we utilized the skills we had learned in an attempt to create an open space for dialogue between youth. While in High School I was also very involved with fundraising for a network of schools in the Kibera slum in Nairobi. After graduating, I took a Gap year where I lived in Cape Town working for a non-governmental organization which provides students in a community with a free, high-quality primary school education, while providing scholarships for students to attending High School and tertiary education. Since 2015 I have been at Bard College in upstate New York where I am a Global and International Studies major, with a primary focus on International Relations and a secondary focus on Economics. I enjoy learning about and discussing global issues, and look forward to SPP in Monterey over the Summer!

Allison Stranger

Allison Stanger is Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College; 2021-22 Research Affiliate (co-lead, Theory of AI Practice Initiative) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; an External Professor and Science Board member at the Santa Fe Institute; and a Senior Advisor to the OSUN Hannah Arendt Humanities Network. In 2020-21, she held the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump (Chinese edition to appear in September 2022) and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is the co-editor (with W. Brian Arthur and Eric Beinhocker) of Complexity Economics, and the co-editor and co-translator (with Michael Kraus) of Irreconcilable Differences? Explaining Czechoslovakia's Dissolution (Foreword by Václav Havel). Stanger’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post. She has been called to testify before Congress on five occasions and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Stanger received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of a memoir, Losing My Cool (2010, Penguin Press) and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The London Review of Books and many other places. He is the recipient of a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin and is a 2019 New America Fellow. He is currently at work on a book, rooted in his experience as the black father of two white-looking children in Paris, that will reckon with the ways in which we construct race in America. 

Getting Here

Bard College's main campus is located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 90 miles north of New York City, 50 miles south of Albany, NY, and 220 miles southwest of Boston. The Conference takes place in Olin Auditorium in the Olin Humanities Building (C3 on the Bard Map). 

Accomodations

A comprehensive list of nearby hotels, inns, and B & B’s may be found on the Bard webpage, HERE. Please review this list. We recommend booking your accommodations and restaurant dining as soon as possible. We do not offer housing options on campus for guests. There are several Airbnb options in the nearby towns; Red Hook and Tivoli. Please be prepared to use Uber, Lyft, and Taxis to get around. Note: The roads surrounding Bard College are not walkable and due to the rural area, local transport is limited. Please keep this in mind when planning your stay. Still need help? Check out visiting Bard College for more helpful hints, click here.

Local hotel offering a Bard Rate during the conference: 

Parking is Free

There are two main parking lots; One across from Olin and one south of Olin Hall -- Please park in either lot. Additionally, you may also park in the gravel lot across from the Stevenson Gymnasium off of Annandale Road. Please click HERE to see the venue map. The black objects represent Parking Lots.