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[Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom ]

Hannah Arendt Center presents:

Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom 

Hannah Arendt Center 13th Annual Fall Conference

Thursday, April 29, 2021 – Friday, April 30, 2021
Olin Hall
10:00 am – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  • Overview
  • Speakers

Speakers

Roger Berkowitz

[Photo Credit: Doug Menuez]
Photo Credit: Doug Menuez
Roger Berkowitz has been teaching political theory, legal thought, and human rights at Bard College since 2005. He is the academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.
Professor Berkowitz is an interdisciplinary scholar, teacher, and writer. His interests stretch from Greek and German philosophy to legal history and from the history of science to images of justice in film and literature. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition; coeditor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics; editor of Revenge and Justice, a special issue of Law, Culture, and the Humanities; and a contributing editor to Rechtsgeschichte. His essays have appeared in numerous academic journals. Roger Berkowitz received his B.A. from Amherst College; J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley; and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. 

Leon Botstein

[Leon Botstein]
President, Bard College. Chairman, Central European University. Board member Open Society Foundations. Music Director, American Symphony Orchestra 1992 to present. Artistic director, Summerscape and Bard Music Festivals. Music Director, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra (2003 to 2010).

Hans Kern

[Hans Kern]
Hans, an American German also from Munich, came to learn about sortition through Jonas and found that it in many ways satisfies his demand for more inclusive decision-making. Hans is a writer, illustrator and self-publisher of environmental manuals, including the [Re]cyclopaedia: global swarming toolbox of all the known strategies for [re]versing global warming and [re]pairing the planet. He believes deliberative sortition is the key to bringing ecologically prudent policy to the political sphere, from the local to the global scale. Hans graduated from Bard College in 2014. 

Darrah Cloud

[Darrah Cloud]
Darrah Cloud’s new play, TURNING, premiered at Centenary Stage in March 2020. SABINA, a musical adaptation of Willy Holtzman’s play for which she wrote the lyrics, premiered at Portland Stage in May 2020. UNDERSTUDY JESUS received a workshop production at Rhinebeck Center for the Performing Arts in Fall 2018. OUR SUBURB premiered at Theater J in Washington, DC in 2014 and has gone on to numerous theatres. JOAN THE GIRL OF ARC toured with Cincinnati Playhouse, 2014. Other plays produced across the U.S. include WHAT’S BUGGING GREG?, THE STICK WIFE, THE MUD ANGEL, DREAM HOUSE, BRAILLE GARDEN, THE SIRENS, HEARTLAND, THE BOXCAR CHILDREN, HONOR SONG FOR CRAZY HORSE and the stage adaptation of Willa Cather’s O PIONEERS! which premiered at the Huntington Stage starring Mary McDonnell and was filmed by American Playhouse. Alum: New Dramatists, member: Honor Roll, Howl Playwrights (Co-director). Graduate of the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, professor at Goddard College, and Town Supervisor of Pine Plains.

Hollie Russon Gilman

[Hollie Russon Gilman]
Dr. Hollie Russon Gilman is a political scientist, lecturer, advisor and civic strategist on topics at the intersection of civic engagement, digital technology, and governance. She is particularly interested in re-vitalizing American democracy, local innovation, and the opportunities and challenges of digital technologies to enhance governance and public policy. She is a frequent writer, speaker, and contributor on these topics. Hollie Russon Gilman holds a PhD and MA from Harvard's Department of Government as well as an A.B. from the University of Chicago with highest honors in political science. Her first book Democracy Reinvented: Participatory Budgeting and Civic Innovation in the United States was noted by Inc.com as a critical book deciding the future of our cities. Her new book Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Democratic Crisis (2019 with Sabeel Rahman, President of Demos, and published by Cambridge University Press, explores how can we empower traditionally marginalized communities and communities of color to have a greater voice and power in civic life and policy making. We examine new organizing models in grassroots communities as well as new governance innovations which leverage civic tech, human-centered design, and participatory governance innovation.
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She is currently a Fellow at New America's Political Reform Program where she leads the Participatory Democracy Project and conducts research on new models of organizing and governance innovation. She is the inaugural Columbia University World Projects Fellow where she is focused on addressing inequality, advancing cities, and supporting democracy. This is a new University initiative to leverage the Research capacity of the university with practice to enact thoughtful change. She is a Lecturer at SIPA on technology and democracy.

She is an Affiliate Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation; where she is conducting research to inform city leaders on civic engagement; and  at Georgetown's Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation.

She previously served in the Obama Administration as the White House Open Government and Innovation Advisor. She has advised numerous companies, startups, and foundations including the Case Foundation, Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, Gates Foundation, Google, Open Society Foundation, the World Bank, and Harvard's Gettysburg Project on 21st Century Engagement. She is a member of the COVID Alliance's Advisory Board on Tech and Ethics.

She has published in numerous academic and popular audience publications including The International Studies Review; PS: Journal of Political Science and Politics, and the Journal of Public Deliberation. Her popular writings have appeared in several news outlets including Axios, The Boston Globe, Foreign Affairs, Slate, Stanford Social Innovation Review, TechCrunch, Vox, and The Washington Post. Updated writings, speaking engagements, and publications are available here. Please see below for a selection of works.
 
She is a recipient of numerous awards, including AAAS Big Data and Analytics Fellowship, Harvard's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Fellowship, Harvard's Ash Center Democracy Fellowship, Fulbright Scholarship, Center for the American Presidency, and Congress Presidential Fellowship.

Jonas Kunz '18

[Jonas Kunz '18]
After finishing his primary education at a Steiner School close to Munich, Germany, Jonas attended Bard College, where he took classes in Ancient Greek, Economics, Philosophy and Politics. Jonas first heard about sortition from his good friend Luke Harrington, who in turn had heard about it from another trusted friend. Searching for a more meaningful democratic process, he quickly recognised: sortition warrants deeper investigation. Upon finishing his thesis for his B.A. in Political Studies on sortition, Jonas invited Hans to co-found B.I.R.D.S. in the Spring of 2018. 

David Van Reybrouck

[David Van Reybrouck]
David Van Reybrouck is considered “one of the leading intellectuals in Europe” (Der Tagesspiegel) and is a pioneering advocate of participatory democracy. He founded the G1000 Citizens' Summit, and his work has led to trials in participatory democracy throughout Belgium and the Netherlands. He is also one of the most highly regarded literary and political writers of his generation; his most recent book, Congo: The Epic History of a People, won 19 prizes, sold 500,000 copies, and has been translated into a dozen languages. It was described as a “masterpiece” by the Independent and “magnificent” by the New York Times.

Jane Suiter 

[Jane Suiter ]
Jane is a Professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University. Jane's expertise lies mainly in the area of the public sphere; and in particular participation and political engagement. Her current research focus is on  citizens’ assemblies and on disinformation. She is co-PI on the Irish Citizen Assembly (2016-2018) (2019-2020) and the Irish Constitutional Convention (2012-2014) and a founder member of We the Citizens (2011), Ireland’s first deliberative experiment. She is a member of the Research Advisory Group on the Scottish Citizens’ Assembly. She has published in 30 plus journals including Representation, International Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, Politics and the International Journal of Communication and is the author of two books including Reimagining Democracy: Lessons in Deliberative Democracy from the Irish Frontline published by Cornell University Press.

Selina Thompson

[Image Credit: Boxed Studios]
Image Credit: Boxed Studios
Selina is an artist and writer whose work has been shown and praised internationally. Her practice is intimate, political and participatory with a strong emphasis on public engagement, which leads to provocative and highly visual work that seeks to connect with those historically excluded by the arts. Selina’s work is currently focused on the politics of marginalisation, and how this comes to define our bodies, relationships and environments. She has made work for pubs, hairdressers, toilets, and sometimes even galleries and theatres, including BBC Radio, the National Theatre Studio and The National Theatre of Scotland as well as theatres across the UK, Europe, Brazil, North America and Australia. Selina has been described as ‘a force of nature’ (The Stage) and ‘an inspiration’ (The Independent). She was featured in The Stage 100 Most Influential Leaders 2018, awarded the Forced Entertainment Award in 2019, and her work Salt was named one of the riskiest of the century by BBC Front Row in 2020.

Tracy B. Strong

[Tracy B. Strong]
Tracy B. Strong is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the University of Southampton (UK) and UCSD Distinguished Professor,emeritus.  He is the author  of many articles and several books, most recently Politics without Vision: ‘Thinking without a Banister’ in the Twentieth Century (Chicago) and ‘Learning our Native Tongue’: Citizenship, Contestation and Conflict in America (Chicago).  From 1990 until 2000, he was editor of Political Theory. An International Journal of Political Philosophy. He has recently been exploring and publishing on the political thought of the great writers of the XIXth century American Renaissance.

James Barry Jr.

[James Barry Jr.]
James Barry Jr. is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University Southeast. He is of author of Measures of Science (Northwestern University Press) and Co-Editor of Merleau-Ponty: Texts and Dialogues (Humanities Press). He is editor of the journal Arendt Studies published by the Philosophy Documentation Center. He is co-founder and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Hannah Arendt Circle. His most recent articles include “The Growth of the Social Realm in Arendt’s Post-Mortem of the Modern Nation-State” and “The Risk of Total Divergence: Politicized Intelligence and Defactualization in the Age of Imminent War.” He is currently completing two book-length studies, one on the legacies of expropriation and the rise of the state of modern poverty at play in Arendt’s work and the other on the ways in which the loss of land- based communities sets the stage for our post-industrial consumeristic world.

Peter MacLeod

[Peter MacLeod]
Peter MacLeod is the founder and principal of MASS LBP, and one of Canada’s leading experts in public engagement and deliberative democracy. Since its founding in 2007, MASS has completed more than 200 major policy projects for governments and public agencies across Canada while pioneering the use of Civic Lotteries and Citizen Reference Panels and earning international recognition for its work.
Peter frequently writes and speaks about the citizen’s experience of the state, the importance of public imagination, and the future of responsible government. 
A graduate of the University of Toronto and Queen’s University, he is the past chair of Toronto’s Wellesley Institute for Urban Health, and currently serves on the boards of Tides Canada, an environmental charity, as well as the Environics Institute and the YMCA of Greater Toronto. He is also an adjunct lecturer at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.

Michael K. MacKenzie

[Michael K. MacKenzie]
Michael MacKenzie’s research interests include democratic theory, intergenerational relations, deliberation, political representation, institutional design, and public engagement. His book project, Future Publics: Democracy, Deliberation, and Future-Regarding Action, is about the challenges and possibilities of making long-term decisions in democratic systems. In that book, and elsewhere, he argues that randomly selected legislatures could help make our democratic systems more future-regarding. His forthcoming paper ‘Democratic Non-Participation,’ which is co-authored with Alfred Moore, explores forms of non-participation that may be justified on democratic grounds.       

Michael MacKenzie holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia (2013) and a Master’s degree in Political Science and Social Statistics from McGill University (2006). In 2006-07 he worked as a policy analyst and facilitator with the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. Since that time he has helped run several other randomly selected assemblies, both large and small. Before coming to the University of Pittsburgh he was a Democracy Fellow and post-doctoral researcher at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Hélène Landemore

[Hélène Landemore]
Hélène Landemore is Associate Professor of Political Science, with Tenure. Her research and teaching interests include democratic theory, political epistemology, theories of justice, the philosophy of social sciences, constitutional processes and theories, and workplace democracy. Hélène is the author of Democratic Reason (Princeton University Press 2013, winner of the Elaine and David Spitz Prize 2015) and Open Democracy (Princeton University Press 2020), as well as a book in French on David Hume, two edited volumes, and multiple peer-reviewed articles. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, the Boston Review, Slate, the Washington Post, L’Humanité, Le Monde, and recently the New Yorker. She is a member of the core group behind the Democratizing Work movement (https://democratizingwork.org). She is currently serving as expert consultant for the French government on a committee evaluating the CESE (Economic, Social and Environmental Council)’s experimentation with randomly selected citizens.
This event occurs on:  Thu. April 29, 10 am – Fri. April 30 – 6 pm

Hannah Arendt knew that democracy is tenuous. In 1970 she famously wrote:

“Representative government is in crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.”


 

Democracy is weakened when citizens are encouraged to hand over the time-consuming work of self-government to professional politicians. Arendt was continuously critical of representative models of democracy that rely upon experts in place of participation, which is why she rooted the crisis of democracy in the dissipation of public power.

Arendt’s response to the disempowerment of the people in our modern world of bureaucratized politics was decentralization and the council system. At all times, when the people are mobilized to engage politically to found freedom they form citizens councils, as happened in New England town meetings, the revolutionary clubs in France, the soviets in Russia, and the municipal councils in Hungary. In every case, these public forums provided spaces for the experience of public and political freedom. The life of the free man needs “a place where people could come together—the agora, the market-place, or the polis, the political space proper.” 

The crisis facing democratic regimes today is cause for serious concern; it is also an opportunity for deep reflection on questions and assumptions concerning liberal representative democracy. Instead of assuming a defensive posture and taking up arms to defend the status quo, our conference asks: how can we revitalize our democracy?

“Sortition” is one answer increasingly forwarded by citizen activists. Sortition means a government of representatives chosen by lottery instead of by election. By bringing nonexpert citizens into political institutions, sortition both breathes energy into representative democracy and nurtures virtue amongst citizens. It is one way to address the deficit of democratic participation that plagues modern democracy.

At the Arendt Center we recently launched the Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy through Sortition (BIRDS), a critical platform for diverse research and resources that are emerging around deliberative democracy and sortition. Sortition is not simply an abstract idea. Around the world, citizen assemblies of randomly selected participants are meeting to discuss and decide upon important political controversies. Our 2020 conference will bring leading experts on democracy and on the use of citizen assemblies to Bard to ask how elements of lottery and citizen governance can help reenergize our democracy. Questions to be asked at our conference include:

            • Can elements of lottery revitalize democracy today?
            • How can we make our representative democracies more participatory?
            • Should we be afraid of democratic populism?
            • How can we reinvigorate institutions of deliberative democracy?
            • What new institutions and practices can energize our politics?

Above all, we ask, how can we revitalize democracy in the 21st century?

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