Magic Theatre presents
Three inCONTEXT panels in association with Citizen Josh

DEMOCRATIC DIALOGUES
Join Josh and political science experts for these post-performance discussions. Democratic Dialogues are free and open to the public.

Sunday, May 27 at 4pm
Josiah “Josh” Ober
Josiah Ober divides his time and academic appointment between the Departments of Classics and Political Science at Stanford University.  He writes and teaches courses on various topics conjoining Greek history, classical philosophy, and political theory and practice. His most recent book Athenian Legacies: Essays on the Politics of Going On Together was published in fall 2005 by Princeton University Press. He is currently completing a book with the working title, Democratic Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens. In addition to his ongoing work on the politics of knowledge and innovation, he is developing a project on the relationship between democracy and inherent human capacities and the ethical implications of that relationship. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Montana State University (1980-1990), and Princeton University (1990-2006).

Sunday, June 3 at 4pm
Nicholas Xenos is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  He has been a Visiting Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and is an Alumnus Fellow of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. The author of Scarcity and Modernity and of essays and reviews in The Nation, Grand Street, The London Review of Books, Logos, and other periodicals, he is currently completing a book on Leo Strauss and his influence on neoconservative foreign policy and editing a collection of Sheldon Wolin’s essays.

Wendy Brown has been teaching and writing political theory for the past 25 years.  She grew up in the Central Valley and, in the early 1970s, went to UC Santa Cruz with a vague idea of becoming a doctor.   But she stumbled into classes taught by radical economists and sociologists, and soon became captivated by Marx's labor theory of value.   Marx led to Hegel, and Hegel to Plato, and by the end of college she had acquired an intellectual passion for the odd genre of Western thought known as political theory and a political passion for making a better world.  After several years of tenant organizing in northern California, she set off for Princeton University, where she studied under Sheldon Wolin as a graduate student at roughly the same time Josh Kornbluth was a Princeton undergraduate. Brown is currently a professor in the Political Science Department at UC Berkeley.   She has also held teaching posts at Williams College and UC Santa Cruz, as well as a number of visiting fellowships in North American and European institutes and universities.   She is the author of five books, including, most recently, Edgework:  Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics  (Princeton, 2005) and Regulating Aversion:  Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton University Press, 2006).

Sunday, June 10 at 4pm
Brian Weiner is Associate Professor and Chair of the Politics Department at the University of San Francisco. Originally from Philadelphia, he now lives in Berkeley (across Ohlone Park from Josh) with his wife, daughter, dog, and (occasionally), stepson. He received his B.A. in Politics from Princeton University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught previously at a Los Angeles high school, at UC Berkeley and UC Davis. Weiner specializes in political theory (from the ancients to contemporary theory), American political theory, and public law. Weiner’s book, The Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National Apologies in the United States, was published by Temple University Press in 2005. The book examines the political and legal issues raised by recent attempts by the U.S. government to redress past wrongs. Weiner is at work on a number of projects, including an examination of issues surrounding the Hawaiian Sovereignty movement, on the ethics of democratic citizenship, and on political issues provoked by public art.