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

Speakers

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, whose 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.

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 (particularly economics), constitutional processes and theories, and workplace democracy.

Roger Berkowitz

Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights, Berkowitz writes and speaks about how justice is made present in the world. He is author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, co-editor of Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2010), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012), and editor of the annual journal HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center. His essay "Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation: Judgment and Worldliness in Hannah Arendt's Politics," has helped bring attention to the centrality of reconciliation in Hannah Arendt's work. The Arendt Center organizes an annual conference every October. Professor Berkowitz edits the Hannah Arendt Center's weekly newsletter, Amor Mundi. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, The American Interest, and many other publications. Berkowitz is the 2019 recipient of the Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in Bremen, Germany. (Photo Credit: Doug Menuez)

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.

Selina Thompson

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.

Michael Weinman

Michael Weinman is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at IU and Professor of Philosophy at Bard College Berlin (on leave 2020-22). He is the author or editor of five books, most recently The Emergence of Illiberalism, co-edited with Boris Vormann

(Routledge, 2020) and Plato and the Moving Image, a volume he co-edited with Shai Biderman (Brill, 2019). His other recent work includes The Parthenon and Liberal Education (SUNY, 2018), co-authored with art historian Geoff Lehman, which investigates the Parthenon as an education in the liberal arts. His research generally focuses on ancient Greek culture, political philosophy, and the intersection of the two.

Photo for Boris Vormann

Boris Vormann

Boris Vormann is Professor of Politics and Director of the Politics Concentration at Bard College Berlin. He is also a principal investigator at the John-F.-Kennedy Institute's Graduate School of North American Studies (Freie Universität Berlin), on the editorial board of American Studies/Amerikastudien, A Quarterly, and associated researcher at the Chaire de Recherche du Canada en Études Québécoises et Canadiennes at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Grounded in political science, his research lies at the intersection of comparative politics and political economy, but is also informed by international relations (IR), macro-sociology and economic geography. It focuses on the role of the state in globalization and urbanization processes; nations and nationalism; and the crisis of democracy. Vormann has held visiting positions at the CUNY Graduate Center, Harvard University, Sciences Po Paris and New York University and was the first political scientist to receive the Fulbright American Studies Award from the German Fulbright Commission and the German Association for American Studies in 2015. His current research project examines the role of the state in building the urban infrastructures of expanding global trade networks.

Ewa Atanassow

Ewa Atanassow has received a PhD from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, an MA in psychology from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests focus on the history of political thought, and on questions of nationhood and democratic citizenship, with emphasis on Tocqueville. She is the co-editor of Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and of Liberal Moments: Reading Liberal Texts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Her articles and reviews have appeared in American Political Science Review, Global Policy, Journal of Democracy, Kronos, Nations and Nationalism, Perspectives on Political Science, Przegląd Polityczny. Her current book project explores the tensions between liberalism and democracy from a Tocquevillean perspective.

Jonas Kunz

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.

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.

Debate

Public Debate: Should federal officeholders in the US should be determined by lottery instead of election?

Thursday, October 15, 2020
Online Event
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

This event occurs on: Thu. October 15, 7 pm – 9 pm

Please join the Bard Debate Union, the Hannah Arendt Center, and the Center for Civic Engagement for a PUBLIC DEBATE on the question:

Should federal officeholders in the United States be determined through sortition instead of election?

Join via Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/99620625005?pwd=VHpMYUJFM0FqVnBNbTcrbE5xYU9xZz09

Hannah Arendt writes: “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.”

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. How can we revitalize our democracy today? How can we make our representative democracies more participatory? Might “sortition”—a system whereby governmental representatives are chosen by lottery instead of by election—provide an answer?

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Reading

Click below to download some recommended reading for the webinar.
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Schedule

10:00 am    Keynote: David Van Reybrouck
Strengthening democracy through sortition: experiences from citizens-led assemblies in Europe

10:30 am.   Conversation: Roger Berkowitz, David van Reybrouck, and Helene Landemore

11:15 am.   Break

11:30 am.   Keynote: Helene Landemore
By the people: When randomly selected citizens write the law; evidence from the French Citizens' Convention for Climate.

12:00pm.   Conversation: Roger Berkowitz, Helene landemore, David van Reybrouck

12:45 pm.   Break

1:00 pm      Citizen Assemblies
Peter Macleod

1:15 pm    Revitalizing Democracy
Selina Thompson

1:30 pm Breakout Sessions
    1. Citizen Assemblies: Peter MacLeod, Hans Kern, Jonas Kunz
    2. Revitalizing Democracy: Selina Thompson, Boris Vormann, Ewa Atanassow, Michael Weinman

This event occurred on: We are pleased to present this special online event, In association with the Open Society University Network, as a prelude to our annual conference, which will take place April 15 & 16, 2021. To learn more about the conference, click here.

This event is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

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? 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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