Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics?

Post Lecture Discussion and Reflection
Sebastian Junger
Moderator: Jana Mader
Olin Hall: Auditorium

Navigating Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: A Dialogue Group Discussion
Virtual Breakout Session [Online Only]
Susan Oberman
Click to join the ZOOM; Meeting ID: 813 1776 2352
Required readings: Public Dialogue and Debate and Dialogue

Peacebuilding Workshop (live stream available)
Mandar Apte
Olin Hall Auditorium

Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism in Israel and Palestine
Shai Lavi and Khaled Furani
Olin Hall: Room 202

Ayishat Akanbi

Ayishat Akanbi is a fashion stylist and writer based in London. With over a decade of experience working with clients such as Rod Stewart, Labrinth, and Naomi Campbell, in the last five years she turned her focus to observing cultural trends.  

It’s widely accepted that everything is political, but it's Ayishat view that much of the personal becoming politicised is helping to fuel tensions. 

Through her talks, interviews, and online posts, Ayishat challenges popular ideas by championing understanding, curiosity, and independent thought. Her belief that self-knowledge and honest reflection can resolve divisions has led her to speak at Google Headquarters, The Sydney Opera House, Tate Modern & The Victoria & Albert Museum. 

Mandar Apte

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Thomas Bartscherer

Thomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He writes on the intersection of literature and philosophy, with a particular focus on tragic drama, aesthetics, and performance. He also writes on contemporary art, new media technology, and the history and practice of liberal education, and is co-editor of the critical edition Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind (forthcoming, 2023).
 

Seyla Benhabib

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University where she taught from 2001 to 2020.  She is currently Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Law Adjunct at Columbia University, and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy. She is also a Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. 

She was the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2006-07 and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1995, and an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy since  2018. She has previously taught at the New School for Social Research and Harvard Universities, where she was Professor of Government from 1993-2000 and Chair of Harvard’s Program on Social Studies from 1996-2000. 

Professor Benhabib is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch prize for 2009, the Leopold Lucas Prize from the Theological Faculty of the University of Tubingen (2012), and the Meister Eckhart Prize (2014; one of Germany’s most prestigious philosophical prizes). A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient (2011-12), she has been research affiliate and senior scholar in many institutions in the US and in Europe including Berlin’s Wissenschaftskolleg (2009), NYU Strauss Center for the Study of Law and Justice (2012), the European University Institute in Florence (Summer 2015), Center for Gender Studies at Cambridge University ( Spring 2017),  Columbia University Law School (Spring 2016; Spring 2018) and Center for Humanities and Critical Theory, Humboldt University Berlin (Summer 2018). She was Albert Hirschman Fellow at the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna in November 2023.  VIEW MORE >>

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 is president and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts of Bard College. Founder of Bard High School Early College, Dr. Botstein put into practice a vision of high school as a public space where young adults, with the guidance of a college level faculty, explore their intellectual potential.

He has published widely in the fields of education, music, and history and culture and is the author of several books including Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture, and editor of The Compleat Brahms and The Musical Quarterly. He is the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and The Orchestra Now (TŌN), and conductor laureate and principal guest conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, where he served as music director. He is the founder and artistic co-director of the Bard Music Festival. His work has been acknowledged with awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Harvard University, government of Austria, and Carnegie Foundation. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011.

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.

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.

Khaled Furani

Khaled Furani is a professor of anthropology at Tel-Aviv University on the lands of al-Sheikh Muwannis. He researches language and literature, theology, secularism, sovereignty, Palestine, and the history of anthropology. For several years, he taught a seminar on "Reading Hannah Arendt for Anthropology." His books include Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry (Stanford University Press 2012) and Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science (Oxford University Press, 2019). He co-edited, with Yara Sa'di-Ibraheem, Inside the Leviathan: Palestinian Experiences at Israeli Universities (in Arabic, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2022). His most recent article is "Khalifah and the Modern Sovereign: Revisiting a Qur'anic Ideal from within the Palestinian Condition" (Journal of Religion, 2022). 

Seth Halvorson

Seth David Halvorson is Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bard College. He earned his BA from Macalester College, an MA from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. For the past 11 years he was Associate Professor of Philosophy, History, and Political Studies at Bard High School Early College, Newark - where he was founding faculty and coach of the debate team. Halvorson works in the intersection of Politics, Ethics, Law, Education, and the History of Ideas. In addition to the First Year Seminar, Seth teaches a common course, The Science of Human Connection. His work focuses on Philosophy of Care, Philosophy and/of Education, and Philosophy and Humor.

Zoë Hitzig

Zoë Hitzig, an economist and writer, is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her research centers on social tradeoffs in the design of computational and economic systems. She is the author of two books of poetry, Mezzanine (2020) and Not Us Now (2024), winner of the Changes Prize. She currently serves as poetry editor of The Drift, and her work has appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Artforum, WIRED and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in economics from Harvard.

Gilbert Johnson

Gilbert Johnson is a native of South Central LA and a dedicated community organizer. He was introduced to civic engagement work in 2009, which marked the last year he was incarcerated. Having to navigate homelessness, gang involvement, substance abuse, and finding it hard to gain sustainable employment, working several odd jobs due to his lengthy criminal record, Gilbert’s prayers were answered when he received the opportunity to be an Outreach Worker and Civic Engagement Specialist at Community Coalition (CoCo), located in the heart of South Central.

After years of deep community engagement and peacebuilding work, Gilbert became the Lead Justice Organizer, leading CoCo's criminal justice reform and reentry work. While at CoCo, Gilbert drafted the 10-Point Plan to Reduce Violence in South Central after his friend, the late Ermias Asghedom, also known as Nipsey Hussle, passed away in 2019. This community-driven initiative morphed into the City of Los Angeles' current South LA Community Safety Initiative (SLACSI). The SLACSI helped reduce violent crime during the summer by implementing healing-centered activities in communities and parks across South Los Angeles.

Gilbert left CoCo to become the CA TimeDone Manager with Californians for Safety and Justice, helping to pass multiple state-level justice reform bills. Gilbert is a member of the Black Men Maroon Space, a group of formerly incarcerated Black men who engage in somatic transformative practices that unpack and address deep traumatic experiences.

Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times Bestselling author of THE PERFECT STORM, FIRE, A DEATH IN BELMONT, WAR, TRIBE, FREEDOM and IN MY TIME OF DYING.   As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film "Restrepo", a feature-length documentary (co-directed with Tim Hetherington), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.   
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Ann Lauterbach

Ann Lauterbach is a poet and essayist. Her eleventh collection of poetry, Door, was bublished by Penguin Random House in March 2023. She writes at the intersection of poetics, politics and the visual arts. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1986) and a MacArthur Fellowship (1993), she is Ruth and David Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature (Written Arts) at Bard College.

Shai Lavi

Shai Lavi is a Professor of Law and heads the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is also the co-director of the Minerva Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of End of Life, and until 2017 was also the founding director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics – both at Tel Aviv University.
 
He received his Ph.D. from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, University of California Berkeley. His book The Modern Art of Dying: A History of Euthanasia in the United States (Princeton University Press) won the 2006 Distinguished Book Award in sociology of law from the American Sociological Association. He was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Berkeley, California, a visiting professor at Toronto University and at Cardozo Law School, and a Humboldt fellow at the Dubnow Instittue for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig and at the faculty of law at the Humboldt University, Berlin. He is currently working on medical authority over the body in Germany, Turkey, and Israel. He is a member of the National Bioethics Council. He is also a member on several editorial boards including Law, Culture and Humanities Journal and Critical Analysis of Law.

Phillip "Rock" Lester

Phillip "Rock" Lester is a community activist, survivor, business owner and formerly incarcerated person. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles within the Harvard Park area.

In 2016, Phillip became involved with policy reform, working with organizations such as ARC and LA Voice and Youth Justice Coalition. He has been active in multiple civic engagement campaigns, helping to advocate for resources within LA county, notably, Measure J as well as criminal justice reform policies in California such as Prop. 57, Prop. 17, SB 1308, SB 1391, SB 1437 and SB 731.

Phillip has an educational background in mathematics, sociology and art. He was honored and awarded in the Fall of 2021 with a Certificate of Appreciation by Arizona State University educators for his role in developing its ‘Future ID’ program, an on-campus course that demonstrates the impact of system-impacted people having a future vision for success.  VIEW MORE >>

Jana Mader

Jana Mader is the Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies and the Humanities. Her teaching and research focus on the history, art, and literature of the Hudson River Valley, particularly in the 19th century. As a scholar, writer, and translator, she works at the intersection of theory and practice. She has published four books, including a novel and a comparative analysis of 19th-century literature on the Hudson Valley and the Rhine. "Walk Her Way New York City" will come out in the Spring of 2025. More about her work can be found at janamarlene.com.

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.

Joseph O'Neill

Joseph O'Neill's novels include Netherland, which received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and Godwin (2024). His writing on politics appears in the New York Review of Books. He was born in Ireland, grew up in the Netherlands, worked as a barrister in London, and now lives in New York. He is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Written Arts at Bard College.

Fintan O'Toole

Fintan O'Toole is a columnist with The Irish Times and advising editor of The New York Review of Books. He is the winner of the Robert Silvers Prize for Journalism, the Orwell Prize and the European Press Prize. He is currently working on the official biography of Seamus Heaney.

Born in Dublin in 1958, he is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and an honorary international member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He taught at Princeton where was Professor of Irish Letters. 
His many books include A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan; White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America; A History of Ireland in 100 Objects; and Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain.

His most recent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 was named Book of the Year in the An Post Irish Book Awards and as one of the ten best books of 2022 by the New York Times. 

Jana Schmidt

Jana Schmidt, assistant professor of German Studies, writes about German and American transatlantic literatures and theory. After completing her PhD in comparative literature at SUNY Buffalo, she first came to Bard as a postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center, where she also served as director of academic programs in 2022–23. She has held fellowships at the German Literature Archive Marbach, German Historical Institute Washington, and at Fordham University and the New York Public Library. Her first book, Hannah Arendt und die Folgen (2018), traces the influence of Hannah Arendt’s thought on the work of a variety of postwar thinkers, artists, and activists. She has written essays for publications such as Philosophy Today, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Narrative Theory, and German Quarterly. Her current writing project deals with the encounter of German-speaking refugees with African American thinkers and politics from the 1940s onward. 

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.

Lyndsey Stonebridge

Lyndsey Stonebridge is a professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham (UK) and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her books include Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees, winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature; and the essay collection Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (Hogarth) was published in January 2024. She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster. She lives in London and France.

Niobe Way

Dr. Niobe Way is Professor of Developmental Psychology and the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University (PACH). She is also past President of the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA) and co-director of the Center for Research on Culture, Development, and Education at NYU.

Her work focuses on the intersections of culture, context, and human development, with a particular focus on social and emotional development and how cultural ideologies influence developmental trajectories. The Listening Project, her current project with Joseph Nelson, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, David Kirkland, and Alisha Ali, aims to foster curiosity and connection in and outside of middle school classrooms across New York City.

In addition, she created and teaches a core course for undergraduates at NYU called The Science of Human Connection. The course describes her theoretical and empirical framework developed over three decades and discussed in her latest co-edited book The Crisis of Connection: Its Roots, Consequences, and Solution (NYU Press).  VIEW MORE >>

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a staff 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 will be published by Knopf.

The Taconic State Parkway and the New York State Thruway provide the most direct routes to our campus. Click the Google link above or get directions by entering the following address into your GPS: 51 Ravine Road, Red Hook, NY 12571. 

From the East: If you are traveling from east of the Hudson River in New York State, take the Taconic State Parkway to the Red Hook / Route 199 exit, drive west on Route 199 through the village of Red Hook to Route 9G, turn right onto Route 9G, drive north 1.6 miles, turn left at the traffic light and continue on Annandale Road through our campus.

From the West: If you are traveling from west of the Hudson River, take the New York State Thruway (I-87) to exit 19 (Kingston), take Route 209 (changes to Route 199 at the Hudson River) over the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge to Route 9G, turn left onto Route 9G, drive north 3.5 miles, turn left at the traffic light and continue on Annandale Road through our campus.

There are two train stations close to Bard College: one in Poughkeepsie (Metro North), New York, and the other in Rhinecliff (Amtrak), New York. Taxi service is available from either station to bring you to campus.  

Amtrak provides service from Albany and from Pennsylvania Station in New York City to Rhinecliff, about 9 miles south of Annandale. Taxi service is available at the station. Travel Time: Approximately two hours (one hour and 40 minutes by train and 15–20 minutes by taxi). Contact Information: Rhinecliff station can be reached at 845-876-3364. Reservations and schedule information at wwe.Amtrak.com

Metro-North commuter railroad provides service from Grand Central Station in New York City to Poughkeepsie, about 26 miles south of campus. Taxi service is available at the station. Travel Time: Approximately one hour and 30 minutes (40–50 minutes by train and 40 minutes by taxi).

Olin Hall

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 through Dutchess County Tourism and through Ulster County Tourism. Please review these lists. 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 Air BnB 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.