SPEAKER

Asaf Savaş Akat is Professor of Economics at Bilgi University in Istanbul, of which he has been president in 1996. He also taught at other two major Istanbul Universities: Marmara and Istanbul University. He is member of the board of editors of several journals and periodicals and of economic organizations. 1993-96 he was founding member, deputy president and candidate for Istanbul of YDH – Yeni Demokrasi Hareketi (liberal political party). Akat is frequent commentator on political and social questions in the Turkish media, Daily Vartan and NTV television.

Albena Azmanova is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Kent, Brussels School of International Studies. She has worked as political consultant to international institutions such as the United Nations and the European Commission. Her research in the past years has covered three fields: political judgment and deliberative public policy, the impact of globalization on political mobilization in Europe, and EU sustainable development policies. She recently published The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment (2012).

Marina Calloni is Professor of Social and Political philosophy at the State University of Milano-Bicocca. Since 2007 she is a component of the Inter-ministerial Committee for Human Rights (CIDU), based at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome. From 2007 to 2010 she was member of the management board of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (based in Vienna) as representative for Italy and director of the «International Network for Research in Gender». Among her last books: A. Saarinen & M. Calloni (eds.), Women Immigrants as constructers of a New Europe. Gender Experiences and Perspectives in European Trans-regions (2012), Y.Galligan, S.Clavero, M.Calloni, Gender Politics and Democracy in Post-socialist Europe (2008).

Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political Science and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on the evolution of preferences and institutions, with contributions to the study of the unpredictability of social revolutions, the dynamics of ethnic conflict, the evolution of morality, perceptions of discrimination, and cultural change. Another research focus is the economics of the Middle East. Most recently he published The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East ( 2011).

Jim Sleeper is a writer and teacher on American civic culture and politics, is a lecturer in political science at Yale and the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (1990) and Liberal Racism (2002). His reportage and commentary have appeared in Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Washington Monthly, Dissent, and many other publications. He has appeared several times each on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the Charlie Rose show, and National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” and has been an occasional commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”. Today he is influential through his personal website/blog jimsleeper.com.

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