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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, October 14, 2021 – Friday, October 15, 2021
Olin Hall
10:00 am – 6:00 pm

  • Overview
  • Special Performance
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Special Performance

The Gauntlet

The Gauntlet is an immersive, community-inclusive choral work from artists Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol. Each time it is performed, it takes on a new personality that reflects the performers, community, and location in which it is experienced. This iteration explores the theme “Spaces of Freedom,” in conjunction with the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.” These are live, in-person, outdoor performances. Proof of vaccination is required and masks must be worn throughout the performance. You must purchase your tickets through the Fisher Center Website. First come, first serve. Registering for the conference DOES NOT secure a ticket to these performance. To learn more and reserve a ticket, please visit the Fisher Center website: The Gauntlet.
[Special Performance]

Schedule

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14

10:00 am  Introduction
Leon Botstein

10:15 am  Revitalizing Democracy, Sortition, and Citizen Power
Roger Berkowitz

10:30 am  Is It Too Late to Revitalize Democracy?
Democratic Innovation on the Eve of Climate Collapse
David Van Reybrouck
Moderator: Roger Berkowitz

Noon  Citizen Assemblies in Ireland and Serbia
Jane Suiter, Gazela Pudar Draško, Irena Fiket, and
Thamy Pogrebinschi
Moderator: Mark Williams Jr. ’18

1:00 pm  Lunch

1:15–2:00 pm  Breakout Session (optional), Olin 201
Advocacy for Citizen Assemblies
David Van Reybrouck, Hans Kern ’14, Jonas Kunz ’18, and Margot Becker

2:00 pm  Jackson Rising
Kali Akuno
Moderator: Mie Inouye

3:00 pm  Future Publics and Council Governance
Michael MacKenzie and Shmuel Lederman
Moderator: Yasemin Sari

4:00 pm  Break

4:30 pm  Citizen Assemblies: Democracy’s Second Act
Peter MacLeod
Moderator: Eva Rovers

5:15 pm  Democracy Reinvented: Participatory Budgeting and
Civic Innovation in America
Hollie Russon Gilman and James Barry Jr.
Moderator: Thomas Bartscherer

6:00 pm  Wine and cheese reception, Blithewood Mansion (outside)

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15

9:45 am  Introduction
Roger Berkowitz

10:00 am  Open Democracy: The French Climate Citizen Assembly
Hélène Landemore
Discussant: Eva Rovers
Moderator: Uday Singh Mehta

11:30 am  The Parallel Polis
Masha Gessen
Moderator: Peter Rosenblum

1:00 pm  Lunch

1:15–2:00 pm  Breakout Session (optional), Olin 202
Citizen Activism
Kali Akuno and Jason Toney ’17

2:30 pm  Learning Our Native Tongue: America as a Project
Tracy B. Strong
Moderator: Allison Stanger

3:30–5:00 pm  Local Sortition Experiments
Mayor Kamal Johnson, Supervisor Robert McKeon, and Supervisor Darrah Cloud
Moderator: David Van Reybrouck
Joined by Bard students enrolled in Van Reybrouck’s course Beyond Elections: Revitalizing Democracy through Citizens’ Assemblies

Speakers

Kali Akuno 

[Kali Akuno ]
Kali Akuno is a co-founder and director of Cooperation Jackson, which is an emerging network of worker cooperatives and supporting institutions. Cooperation Jackson is fighting to create economic democracy by creating a vibrant solidarity economy in Jackson, MS that will help transform Mississippi and the South.
 VIEW MORE >>
Kali served as the Director of Special Projects and External Funding in the Mayoral Administration of the late Chokwe Lumumba of Jackson, MS. His focus was supporting cooperative development, sustainability, human rights and international relations. 

Kali Akuno is an organizer, educator, and writer for human rights and social justice. He is the former Co-Director of the US Human Rights Network.  Kali also served as the Executive Director of the Peoples' Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF) based in New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. And was a co-founder of the School of Social Justice and Community Development (SSJCD), a public school serving the academic needs of low-income African American and Latino communities in Oakland, California.

Kali is also the co-editor of "Jackson Rising: the Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, MS", and the author of numerous articles and pamphlets including the Jackson-Kush Plan: the Struggle for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy", "Until We Win: Black Labor and Liberation in the Disposable Era", "Operation Ghetto Storm: Every 28 Hours report" and "Let Your Motto Be Resistance: A Handbook on Organizing New Afrikan and Oppressed Communities for Self-Defense".

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.

Thomas Bartscherer

[Thomas Bartscherer]
Thomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. Current projects include When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, which he is co-editing for Cambridge University Press, and the new critical edition of Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind, forthcoming in the Complete Works series. He also writes for performance: Stranger Love, an opera he created with composer Dylan Mattingly, will premiere in Los Angeles in 2023. His research and teaching interests include literature and philosophy in antiquity, the reception of ancient motifs in modern and contemporary culture, the theory and practice of liberal democracy, and the history and practice of liberal education. 
 

Margot Becker

[Margot Becker]
Margot Becker is an environmental activist focusing on climate action and waste systems transformation. As a member of the Global Assembly team, she is helping to bring the world’s first global citizens assembly alongside the United Nations COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow in Fall 2021. (GlobalAssembly.org)

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).

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.


Irena Fiket

[
Irena Fiket]

Irena Fiket is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. She is a member of the Standing group ‘Democratic Innovations’ of European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) and former member of the group steering committee. She serves as an Academic coordinator of Jean Monnet Network Active citizenship: promoting and advancing innovative democratic practices in the Western Balkans. She is also engaged as senior researcher in the Horizon 2020 project Enlightened trust: An examination of trust and distrust in governance – conditions, effects and remedies and Volkswagen Stifung sponsored project Cultures of Rejection in Europe. The main research topics that she worked on whilst at the Universities of Florence, Siena, Bologna, and Oslo as a postdoc, include citizen participation, democratic innovation, deliberative democracy, European identity, European public sphere, European Higher Education and Western Balkans. 

[Photo credit: Lena Di]
Photo credit: Lena Di
Masha Gessen is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and the author of 11 books of nonfiction, including The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the 2017 National Book Award for nonfiction, and, most recently, Surviving Autocracy. Gessen is currently working on a book about imaginative political projects. Gessen is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, and other honors. They live in New York City.

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.
 VIEW MORE >>
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.

Mie Inouye

[Mie Inouye]
Mie Inouye is Assistant Professor of Political Studies at Bard College. Her research focuses on theories of democratization in the twentieth-century American labor and civil rights movements. She has written about organizing for Jacobin and The Forge and she has a forthcoming article on civil rights organizer Ella Baker's theory of organizing in the American Political Science Review. 

Kamal Johnson

[Kamal Johnson]
Born and raised in Hudson, Kamal Johnson was elected to serve as the Mayor of Hudson, New York in November 2019. He made history as the city’s first black Mayor, and at 34 years old, its youngest. As a child, Kamal’s family was directly impacted by poverty, addiction, and incarceration. These experiences inform his work as a community and youth advocate, and his vision for a city that is safe and equitable for all. Upon entering office in January 2020, he was immediately confronted with the issues posed by COVID-19. Partnering to create the Shared Streets program, Hudson Safe, WiFi hotspots, and more, Mayor Kamal has helped the city navigate one of the hardest years on record. Johnson is a graduate of Columbia Greene Community College (‘05) and SUNY New Paltz (’07), with degrees in History & Early Childhood Education.

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. 

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. 

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.

Shmuel Lederman

[Shmuel Lederman]
Dr. Shmuel Lederman is a research fellow at the Weiss-Livnat Center for Holocaust Research and Education at the University of Haifa, and a lecturer at the University of Haifa and at the Open University of Israel. He also serves as the Assistant Editor of the journal History & Memory. His main fields of interest are political theory and genocide studies. He has published numerous articles on Hannah Arendt's political thought, and his first book, Hannah Arendt and Participatory Democracy: A People's Utopia, was published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan.
 

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.

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.

Robert McKeon

[Robert McKeon]
Robert Mckeon is the Red Hook Town Supervisor. He came to Red Hook in 1998 after a successful career in real estate in Brooklyn. With his wife and three daughters, McKeon raises livestock on a 500-acre family farm. McKeon has performed volunteer work in the local agricultural community and helped develop farmland and open-space programs that have become models for other communities.

In 2003, he spearheaded a public referendum to purchase Development Rights on farms. The motion was approved by 83% of voters. To date, over 45 properties and 4,000 acres of preserved farmland join other types of open space easements in the Township. In 2007 he was named a Hudson Valley Hero by Scenic Hudson for efforts that also included the creation of a Community Preservation Fund. 
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As Town Supervisor, McKeon has helped put Red Hook on the Sustainability Map.  Only the fourth New York town to be named by a NYSERDA Clean Energy Community, Red Hook was awarded $100K to put towards a Net Zero Red Hook program.

McKeon oversaw the Red Hook Community Solar project which, in 2019, began providing hometown solar for 280 homes in addition to all municipal buildings. Red Hook participated in the Hudson Valley Community Choice Aggregation initiative, a cooperative with six nearby municipalities that purchases renewable energy for all the remaining residential electric accounts in the Township.  Charge Red Hook is an initiative to facilitate conversion to electric vehicles. Ten charging stations have been installed at Town and Village Halls, and Red Hook won a grant for two all-electric vans to transport seniors and others in the community.

McKeon continues to work for accessibility, sustainability, and accountability in Red Hook, with major renovations to the local recreational park, ongoing construction of a trailway, recruiting diverse municipal employees, and televising local government meetings.

Uday Mehta

[Uday Mehta]
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.” He has a forthcoming book titled A Different Vision: Gandhi’s Critique of Political Rationality.


Thamy Pogrebinschi

[
Thamy Pogrebinschi]

Thamy Pogrebinschi is a Senior Researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and faculty member of the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her work lies at the intersection between democratic theory and comparative politics, with a focus on Latin America. Her research focuses on democratic innovations, new forms of citizen participation, and their impact on policy and democracy at the macro level. She is also interested on the role digital technology plays on representation and participation and, more recently, on collective intelligence. Since late 2015, she has been the coordinator of LATINNO (Innovations for Democracy in Latin America), the most comprehensive database on democratic innovations evolved in 18 countries of Latin America between 1990 and 2020. Her team of over thirty PhD and master students has collected and assessed around 3600 cases of democratic experiments involving deliberation, citizen representation, digital engagement, and direct voting. LATINNO has been funded by the Open Society Foundations and the Open Society Initiative for Europe and is based at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

Gazela Pudar Draško

[Gazela Pudar Draško]
Gazela Pudar Draško is a political sociologist, a Director at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Currently, she is engaged on Volkswagen Stiftung sponsored project Cultures of Rejections in Europe and Horizons 2020 project Enlightened trust: An examination of trust and distrust in governance – conditions, effects and remedies. She serves as an Executive Board Member of the Institute for Democratic Engagement Southeast Europe (IDESE) and Coordinating Board Member of the Network for Academic Solidarity and Engagement (MASA). She has been engaged as consultant and researcher in numerous projects with international organizations like UNDP, UNHCR, Council of Europe, Westminster Foundation for Democracy, etc. She writes on the intellectual engagement, social movements and gender.

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.

Eva Rovers

[Eva Rovers]
Dr. Eva Rovers is a cultural historian with a PhD from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and the author of several critically acclaimed books on cultural history and societal change. For the past two years, she has been studying Climate Citizens’ Assemblies (CCAs) across Europe. This sortition-based form of democracy has been heralded as one of the most innovative tools for developing much needed ambitious climate policies, while at the same time strengthening democracies by engaging everyday people in decision making. Climate Citizens’ Assemblies are deliberative processes in which randomly selected citizens learn about climate change, deliberate possible solutions, and formulate a set of recommendations for their government.
 VIEW MORE >>
As a founding member of Bureau Burgerberaad (Platform for Citizens’ Assemblies), the leading organization for promoting climate assemblies in The Netherlands, Eva has brought together academics, politicians, journalists, activists, policy-makers, and everyday citizens around the topic of deliberative democracy. She has advised both local and national policy makers on climate assemblies, and has advocated for the practice of deliberative democracy in the Dutch national parliament. Currently she is coordinating an international collective learning project, Climate Citizens’ Assemblies: Learning With, From and For Europe.

Yasemin Sari

[Yasemin Sari]
Yasemin Sari is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and World Religions at the University of Northern Iowa. As a political philosopher, her work mainly focuses on democratic political theory, especially as it relates to human rights, extra-institutional recognition, and the borders between citizen and non-citizen. Her current research takes up the global refugee crisis.

Allison Stanger

[Allison Stanger]
Allison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, Technology and Human Values Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Consumers vs. Citizens: Social Inequality and Democracy’s Public Square in a Big Data World. Stanger’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and she has testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. In 2021, Stanger was named Senior Advisor of the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network. 

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.

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.

Jason Toney

[Jason Toney]
Jason Toney graduated from Bard in 2016 and was a former Hannah Arendt Center Student Fellow. He is a publisher with Black Rose Books, a researcher, and an activist based in Montréal. He is the editor of Take the City: Voices of Radical Municipalism (Black Rose Books, 2021) and his most recent essay, “On Hannah Arendt and Murray Bookchin: Bridging Intellectual Legacies,” was published in the collection Enlightenment and Ecology: The Legacy of Murray Bookchin in the 21st Century (Black Rose Books, 2021). Jason is also an assistant to Kari Polanyi Levitt, the Administrator of the Karl and Kari Polanyi Foundation, and on the Organizing Committee of Prenons la ville! (Take the City!) in Montréal, which coordinates with community groups and works towards the establishment of neighborhood assemblies with decision-making power.

Mark Williams Jr.

[Mark Williams Jr.]
Mark Williams Jr. is a public health educator and program manager in the Department of Neurology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where he develops and tests community-based behavioral interventions for African American populations in NIH-funded randomized control trials. He is also a fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College, and is the former Director of Access, Equity, and Inclusion Programs at Bard High School Early College Manhattan, where he designed and taught social and behavioral sciences courses for high school and college students. His research focuses on the pragmatics of harm reduction and community-based participatory research to address health disparities in urban environments, the bioethics of emerging concepts and technologies in the biomedical sciences, and the relationship between public health, aesthetic philosophy, and critical theory in health communications. He is an award-winning teacher and student mentor having most recently been recognized in 2020 with the Outstanding Educator Award from the University of Chicago, for his commitment to careful educational instruction and student development both inside and outside of the classroom. He graduated from Bard College with a degree in Anthropology and Global Public Health and is currently a M.S. candidate in Community Health Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Registration

Members 

Members receive complimentary admission. If you would like to become a member or renew a membership, please click HERE. If you are unsure if your membership is current, please contact the Hannah Arendt Center at [email protected]. Memberships are valid for one year.

Lunch Options

Here are the following lunch options:

            1. Lunch Pre-Ordering is now closed.
2. On-Campus: $12/per person at Kline Commons
We strongly recommend purchasing lunch at the newly designed Kline Commons cafeteria on campus, a short walk from Olin Hall. Guests pay at the door at Kline Commons. All you can eat, plenty of seating, buffet-style, and lots of space. Click Here to see a map: Kline & Olin are indicated with red boxes. You do not need to pre-order with this option.

3. Off-Campus
There are plenty of lunch options nearby in Red Hook, Tivoli, Germantown, and Rhinebeck.
Click here to view a full list of local restaurants and cafes. 

REGISTRATION

IN PERSON REGISTRATION IS CLOSED.

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Webcast

For those unable to attend the conference in person, we offer a live webcast of the full event for you to enjoy from wherever you're located.

WEBCAST REGISTRATION

Readings

“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.”

—Hannah Arendt, 1970

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Videos



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Location

Getting Here

[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). 

Accommodations

[Accommodations]
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: 

The Best Western Plus in Kingston, NY.  To make reservations using the Bard discount, you must call the hotel direct at 845-338-0400 and ask for the “Bard College Discount.” (20% off) We recommend booking your accommodations as early as possible.

Parking is Free

[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.
This event occurred on: 

WATCH THE RECORDINGS ON YOUTUBE 

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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