Next week I am off to the New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. The Institute opens today, but I will be arriving a few days late. As I review the events of this week at Deliberately Considered, I am anticipating my work at the Institute, which will be reflected in upcoming posts. The last two posts, on Iran and on American identity, in fact, were informed by Democracy and Diversity experience.

In the most mundane way, the Institute is like many other international summer schools. Students from many different countries, this year Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Italy, Poland, and the USA, among others, come together to study a set of problems from a number of different academic perspectives. As usual, in my judgment, the topics are particularly interesting, this year, each addressing the theme of the year The World in Crisis: “Gender in Crisis? Strengths and Weaknesses in the Strategy of Emergency” (Prof. Ann Snitow), “Media and News in a Time of Crisis” (Prof. Jeffrey Goldfarb and Prof. Daniel Dayan), “Romancing Violence: Theories and Practices of Political Violence” (Prof. Elzbieta Matynia), and “‘We the People’: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Belonging” (Prof. Sharika Thiranagama). Still there are many summer schools that offer interesting programs with talented students such as we have. Yet, there is something special about this Institute that makes it different than most summer programs, linked to its history.

In terms of my student’s observations and reflection on Iran this week, our institute is in a sense, paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, a not so lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition. He observed how freedom was experienced in the days before and after the 2009 elections in his country, and noted how even in the face of extreme repression, the ability of independent people to speak and act in each other’s presence is still consequential, apparently preventing the execution of Habibollah Latifi. But the real significance of the free politics, before the elections of 2009 and through the Facebook . . .

Read more: DC Week in Review: Democracy and Diversity and Free Public Action