Dialogue Starters Announced For Civil Dialogue at Arena Stage, 1/14

Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater continues to host Arena Civil Dialogues to engage the D.C.-area community. Scholar, professor and public intellectual Amitai Etzioni typically curates and moderates a series of discussions focusing on topics and questions in today's headlines. However, the next Arena Civil Dialogue will be in celebration of Professor Etzioni's 90th birthday and will explore the role of community in our personal and collective future. The dialogue 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 Monday, January 14, 2019.

Must we be tribal? This question will be explored during the January 14 Dialogue and will be moderated by Xolela Mangcu, professor of Sociology at The George Washington University. The Dialogue Starters that evening include Amitai Etzioni, university professor at The George Washington University; William Galston, Ezra K. Zilkha chair and senior fellow, Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution; and Isabel Sawhill, senior fellow, Economic Studies, Center on Children and Families at The Brookings Institution.

Upcoming Schedule
Sunday, November 11, 2018: 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?

Monday, January 14, 2019: Must we be tribal? The role of community in our personal and collective future.
Celebrating Amitai Etzioni at 90.

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

January 14 Dialogue Starter Biographies
Xolela Mangcu (moderator) is a professor of Sociology at the University of Cape Town, Oppenheimer Fellow at the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research at Harvard University and professor of Sociology at The George Washington University. He is the author and co-author of nine books, and more than two dozen journal articles and book chapters, including Biko: A Biography (Tafelberg 2012), which was subsequently published in London and New York by one of Europe's leading academic publishers I.B. Tauris (2013). His book on race in contemporary South Africa, The Colour of Our Future, was published by Wits University Press in 2015. The Sunday Times has described Mangcu as possibly the most prolific public intellectual in South Africa. The academic Peter Vale has described him as the most interesting, certainly the most engaging voice amongst the new generation of public intellectuals in South Africa.

Amitai Etzioni (curator) is a university professor and professor of International Relations at The 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.

William A. Galston is the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair and senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's Governance Studies Program. Prior to January 2006, he was the Saul Stern professor and acting dean at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). Galston was deputy assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy from 1993 to 1995. Galston is a winner of the American Political Science Association's Hubert H. Humphrey Award and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the co-chair of The New Center with Bill Kristol. His most recent book is Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (Yale, 2018).

Isabel V. Sawhill is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. She served as vice president and director of the Economic Studies program from 2003 to 2006. She has been a co-director with Ron Haskins of the Center on Children and Families. Prior to joining Brookings, Dr. Sawhill was a senior fellow at The Urban Institute. She served in the Clinton Administration as an associate director of OMB, where her responsibilities included all of the human resource programs of the federal government, accounting for one third of the federal budget. She has authored or edited numerous books and articles including Generation Unbound: Drifting Into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage; Creating an Opportunity Society with Ron Haskins; Restoring Fiscal Sanity 2005: Meeting the Long-Run Challenge and Restoring Fiscal Sanity: How to Balance the Budget, both with Alice Rivlin; and One Percent for the Kids: New Policies, Brighter Futures for America's Children.

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