Dialogue Starters Announced For 10/14 Civil Dialogue at Arena Stage

Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater will continue to host Arena Civil Dialogues to engage the D.C.-area community. Scholar, professor and public intellectual Amitai Etzioni has curated and will moderate a series of discussions focusing on topics and questions in today's headlines. The next Arena Civil Dialogue will be exploring well-being in a digital world and will be held in the Molly Smith Study at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater from 5:30-7 p.m. on October 14, 2018.

Arena Civil Dialogues bring together Dialogue Starters with expertise on the evening's topic. The Dialogue Starters for October 14 will include Ellen P. Goodman, co-director and co-founder of the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law and professor of law, Rutgers University; Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union Washington Legislative Office; Maggie Jackson, award-winning author and journalist; Marc Rotenburg, president and executive director of Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC); and Maurice Turner, senior technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Upcoming Schedule
Sunday, October 14: Exploring well-being in a digital world
In the digital age, does constant technology connection undermine our well-being? How can we use technology to improve our overall health? Can we prevent cyberbullying and online hate speech?

Sunday, November 11: What makes a great America?
Who decides what makes America great? What are the alternate views of what makes a great America, at home and in a global sense? Can America still call itself a global leader?

There will be a reception before the discussion, starting at 5 p.m. in the Grand Lobby. This event is free and open to the public; reservations are required.

For more information and to register for future Arena Civil Dialogues, visit: arenastage.org/civildialogues

October 14 Dialogue Starter Biographies
Amitai Etzioni (curator and moderator) is a university professor and professor of International Relations at George Washington University. He served as a senior advisor at the Carter White House; taught at Columbia University, Harvard University and University of California at Berkeley; and served as president of the American Sociological Association (ASA). A study by Richard Posner ranked him among the top 100 American intellectuals. Etzioni is the author of many books, including The Limits of Privacy (1999) and Privacy in a Cyber Age (2015). His most recent book, Happiness is the Wrong Metric: A Liberal Communitarian Response to Populism, was published by Springer in January 2018.

Ellen P. Goodman is a professor of law at Rutgers Law School. She co-directs and co-founded the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law and launched the News Law Project. She has published widely on media models, spectrum policy, smart cities, the Internet of Things, First Amendment, public interest models in communications and advertising law. Goodman's current project deals with public access to information about government deployment of big data predictive algorithms. She served in the Obama administration as a distinguished visiting scholar with the Federal Communications Commission and has been a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and the University of Pennsylvania. She has been the recipient of Ford Foundation and Geraldine R. Dodge grants for work on advancing new public media models and public interest journalism. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, Goodman was a partner at the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP, where she practiced in the information technology area. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, clerked for Judge Norma Shapiro on the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and has three children. She also writes periodically for The Guardian and Slate on information policy.

Neema Singh Guliani is a legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union Washington Legislative Office, focusing on surveillance, privacy and national security issues. Prior to joining the ACLU, she worked in the chief of staff's office at DHS, concentrating on national security and civil rights issues. She has also worked as an adjudicator in the office of the assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Agriculture and was an investigative counsel with House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, where she conducted investigations related to the BP oil spill, contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Recovery Act. Neema is a graduate of Brown University where she earned a BA in international relations with a focus on global security and received her JD from Harvard Law School in 2008.

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and former Boston Globe contributing columnist best-known for her writings on technology's impact on humanity. Her articles, books, and commentary have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, on National Public Radio and in media worldwide. Newly released in an updated edition, her acclaimed book, Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention, sounded a prophetic warning of our current crisis of inattention. Hailed as "influential" by The New Yorker and compared by Fast Company.com to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Distracted offers a harrowing yet hopeful account of the fate of our highest human capacity. Jackson's essays also appear in numerous anthologies, including State of the American Mind: Sixteen Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism (Templeton, 2015) and The Digital Divide: Arguments For and Against Facebook, Google, Texting and the Age of Social Networking (Penguin, 2011). The recipient of many grants, awards and fellowships, she has served as a 2016 Bard Graduate Center visiting fellow; a journalism fellow in Child and Family Policy at the University of Maryland; and a finalist for the Hillman Prize, one of journalism's highest honors for social justice reporting. A graduate of Yale University and the London School of Economics with highest honors, Jackson lives in New York City and Rhode Island. Currently, she is working on a new book about uncertainty as the gateway to good thinking in an age of snap judgment. Follow her work or reach her at www.maggie-jackson.com.

Marc Rotenberg is president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. (epic.org). He teaches privacy at Georgetown Law and is the author of several books and many articles. Marc took up sailing to escape the world of technology, but even sailing is now transformed by technology.

Maurice Turner is a senior technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit advocacy organization dedicated to ensuring the internet remains open, innovative and free. Supporting work across all of CDT's programmatic areas, Turner focuses on the Election Security and Privacy Project identifying and updating election cybersecurity practices and infrastructure and working through potential remedies. Turner brings a unique mix of formal education and practical work experience in technology and local, regional and national policymaking to the Internet Architecture project. After receiving a bachelor's in political science from Cal State Fullerton, he went on to earn a master's in public administration from the University of Southern California focusing on emerging communication technologies, privacy and civic engagement. In addition, he holds a graduate certificate in cybersecurity strategy from Georgetown University. As a TechCongress Congressional Innovation Fellow in 2017, he served the Republican staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (reporting to Chairman Sen. Ron Johnson) supporting on cybersecurity issues. His previous employers include the City of Newport Beach, EarthLink Municipal Networks, Center for Democracy and Technology, Coro Foundation, United Medical Center Hospital, U.S. Department of Transportation and Apple. Turner has been a technology enthusiast for over 30 years and is committed to leveraging new technologies to increase government effectiveness and community engagement.

Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater, under the leadership of Artistic Director Molly Smith and Executive Producer Edgar Dobie, is a national center dedicated to American voices and artists. Arena Stage produces plays of all that is passionate, profound, deep and dangerous in the American spirit, and presents diverse and ground-breaking work from some of the best artists around the country. Arena Stage is committed to commissioning and developing new plays and impacts the lives of over 10,000 students annually through its work in community engagement. Now in its seventh decade, Arena Stage serves a diverse annual audience of more than 300,000. arenastage.org