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.

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. 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 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.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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. 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.