Rage and Reason: Democracy Under the Tyranny of Social Media

Roger Berkowitz

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

Leon Botstein

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

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

Mike Cosper

Mike Cosper is a writer and podcast producer, and the Senior Director of Podcasts at Christianity Today. In 2021, he produced and hosted The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, a serialized podcast exploring the institutional and cultural challenges facing the modern church, including virtue formation, gender, celebrity, and the distorting power of media. 

Mike is the author of five books, including Recapturing the Wonder, a book about spiritual formation in a secular age. He has forthcoming works on wisdom and character formation in the Sermon on the Mount (IVP, 2023) and a Christian reading of the work of Hannah Arendt (Brazos Press, 2024).

Prior to his work in media, he served as a founding pastor of Sojourn Church in Louisville and worked as a studio and touring musician. Mike lives in Louisville with his wife, Sarah, their two daughters. If you listen closely, you can almost always hear one of their dogs snoring in the background of his podcasts.

Myisha Cherry

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

Deirdre D'Albertis

Deirdre D'Albertis is the Vice President and Dean of Bard College. As chief academic officer, Dean Deirdre d'Albertis works with the president and the faculty to advance the central academic purpose of Bard College.

William Davies

William Davies is Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is author of books including Nervous States: Democracy & the Decline of Reason (Norton, 2019), Unprecedented?: How Covid-19 Revealed the Politics of Our Economy (Goldsmiths Press, 2022) and The Happiness Industry: How the Government & Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing (Verso, 2015). He is a regular contributor to London Review of Books and The Guardian.

Nick Dunn

Nicholas Dunn (PhD, McGill University, 2020) is the Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where he will also teach courses in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Studies and for the Bard Prison Initiative. His primary research is on Immanuel Kant, with a focus on metaphysics of mind, ethics, and aesthetics.

Steven Garabedian

Steven Garabedian is Associate Professor of History at Marist College. He is the author of A Sound History: Lawrence Gellert, Black Musical Protest, and White Denial (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020).

Frances Haugen

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

Catherine Holland

Catherine Holland is the Director of Political Analysis at the Center for Social Computation.  In a previous life, she taught feminist thought and political thought at the University of Missouri.  She is the author of The Body Politic: Foundings, Citizenship, and Difference in the American Political Imagination (Routledge, 2001), as well as articles published in Theory & Event, Political Theory, American Journal of Political Science, and the American Political Science Review.

Mie Inouye

Mie Inouye is an Assistant Professor of political theory at Bard. Her scholarship investigates the ways that institutions shape people’s understandings of themselves and the social world and the practices that allow oppressed people to develop and exercise agency. She writes about organizing, labor, social movements, and religion in academic and popular venues including The American Political Science Review, Jacobin Magazine, The Forge, The Political Theology Network, and Boston Review.

Jamil Jan Kochai

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories and 99 Nights in Logar, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018, and The Best American Short Stories. Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

Steven Mazie

Steven Mazie (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is Professor of Political Studies at Bard High School Early College-Manhattan, where he teaches political theory and public law. He has also taught at Bard College, New York University and the University of Michigan. Mazie is author of American Justice 2015: The Dramatic Tenth Term of the Roberts Court (University of Pennsylvania Press), Israel’s Higher Law: Religion and Liberal Democracy in the Jewish State (Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books) and articles in Polity, Perspectives on Politics, Field Methods, Theory and Research in Education, Review of Faith and International Affairs and the Law Journal for Social Justice. He is also Supreme Court correspondent for The Economist (2013-present) and has published op-eds in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, SCOTUSblog, Slate and the New York Times. He frequently appears on radio and podcasts including The Economist's “The Intelligence” and "Checks and Balance."

Wyatt Mason

Wyatt Mason is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a Writer in Residence at Bard, where he is a Senior Fellow of the Hannah Arendt Center.

Pankaj Mishra 

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

Uday Mehta

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

Lucas G. Pinheiro

Lucas G. Pinheiro is a political theorist and Assistant Professor of Politics at Bard College. He works on the development of global capitalism, empire, and racial slavery in the Atlantic world since the seventeenth century. His current book project is titled Factories of Modernity: Political Thought in the Capitalist Epoch, and his articles, essays, and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in Modern Intellectual History, Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and Disability and Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Suzanne Nossel

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

Colin Megill

Colin Megill is cofounder of pol.is and President of The Computational Democracy Project. Polis is an online tool used to gather open ended feedback from large groups of people. It is well suited to gathering organic, authentic feedback while retaining minority opinions. Polis has been widely covered in the popular press — including articles from The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economist and MIT Tech Review — as well as in documentaries from the BBC and books from Penguin. 

Peter Rosenblum

Peter Rosenblum is Professor of International Law and Human Rights at Bard College. He has served as human rights officer at the United Nations Human Rights Centre (now Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) and as consultant to Human Rights Watch/Africa.

Dylan Sparks (Bard Class of 2019)

Dylan Sparks is a Policy Advisor at Reset, a philanthropic initiative, where he works with civil society organisations and policy makers to tackle digital threats to democracy through legislation. 

Allison Stanger

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

Renata Salecl

Renata Salecl is a philosopher, sociologist and legal theorist. She is Professor at the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London and senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology at Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her book Tyranny of Choice has been published in 15 languages. Her last book is A Passion for Ignorance: What We Choose Not to Know and Why (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Jana Schmidt

Jana Schmidt is Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center and author of Hannah Arendt und die Folgen.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Prior to that he was a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a columnist at Harper’s. He is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow and a visiting fellow at AEI. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from Yaddo, MacDowell and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. He is a visiting professor of the humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College and his next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf.

Thursday, October 13th

10:00am Introduction
Deirdre D'Albertis

10:15am  Rage and Reason: Democracy Under the Tyranny of Social Media
Roger Berkowitz

10:30am  The Age of Anger: Pankaj Mishra
Moderator: Uday Singh Mehta

11:45am
Break

12:15 The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-racist Struggle
Myisha Cherry
Moderator: Lucas G. Pinheiro

1:00 pm
Lunch

1:30-2:20  Break-Out Session: “Is Rage a Kind of Reason?,” (optional)
Olin 205
Moderator: Nicholas Dunn
Space limited- first come first serve

2:30pm Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
William Davies
Moderator: Roger Berkowitz


3:30pm Common Futures?
Catherine Holland
Moderator: Jana Schmidt

4:30pm
Break

5:00  Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech For All
Suzanne Nossel
Moderator: Peter Rosenblum

6:00 pm Wine & Cheese Reception

Friday, October 14th

9:30am Introduction
Leon Botstein

10:00am
Is Social Media Compatible with Democracy?
11:15am
Break 

11:45am
Scaling Deliberation: Polis and the Computational Democracy Project
Colin Megill 
Moderator: Steven Mazie 

1:00 pm
Lunch 

1:15-2:15
Break-Out Session 1: “Sounds of Protest” (Optional)
Room: Olin 202
Moderator: Steven Garabedian
Space limited- first come first serve

1:15-2:15
Break-Out Session 2: “Rage as the Common Sense” (Optional)
Room: Olin 204
Moderator: Mie Inouye
Space limited- first come first serve

2:30 pm
Facebook, Twitter, and the Danger to Public Reason
Frances Haugen 
Moderator Dylan Sparks '19

3:45 pm Unreality in Fiction
Jamil Jan Kochai
Moderator: Wyatt Mason

5:00pm - 6:00pm Olin Atrium
Wine & Cheese Reception
 

Full Program

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Getting Here

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

Accomodations

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

Local hotel offering a Bard Rate during the conference: 

Parking is Free

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

Facebook Group

Looking for a ride? Do you want to organize a get-together outside the conference? Interested in carrying on the conversation? Connect with other conference attendees to plan, discuss, coordinate before the event! Join the Facebook Group.