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

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 >>

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 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 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

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

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’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 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. 

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

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 >>

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

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, 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

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

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 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 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 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.   VIEW MORE >>

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 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 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 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

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 >>

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 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 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 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 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. 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.

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