Join author and UC Berke­ley alum Rebecca Sol­nit and oth­ers as they bring both Arts + Design Mon­days and the 2018 Bay Area Book Fes­ti­val to a close with a con­ver­sa­tion on the idea of hope. Sol­nit, together with a range of Berke­ley pro­fes­sors, authors, and com­mu­nity activists, will dis­cuss our fraught polit­i­cal land­scape, how lit­er­a­ture and art help us to nav­i­gate through crises, and how hope helps us to assem­ble and reassem­ble our com­mu­ni­ties and social movements.

Writer, his­to­rian, and activist Rebecca Sol­nit is the author of twenty books on fem­i­nism, West­ern and indige­nous his­tory, pop­u­lar power, social change and insur­rec­tion, wan­der­ing and walk­ing, hope and dis­as­ter. Her works include a tril­ogy of atlases as well as The Mother of All Ques­tions; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; The Far­away Nearby; A Par­adise Built in Hell: The Extra­or­di­nary Com­mu­ni­ties That Arise in Dis­as­ter; A Field Guide to Get­ting Lost; Wan­der­lust: A His­tory of Walk­ing; and River of Shad­ows: Ead­weard Muy­bridge and the Tech­no­log­i­cal Wild West (for which she received a Guggen­heim, the National Book Crit­ics Cir­cle Award in crit­i­cism, and the Lan­nan Lit­er­ary Award).

Shan­non Jack­son is asso­ciate vice chan­cel­lor for the arts and design, Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Chair in the Human­i­ties, and pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ments of Rhetoric and The­ater, Dance, and Per­for­mance Stud­ies at UC Berke­ley. She has received numer­ous awards and fel­low­ships, includ­ing a 2015 John Simon Guggen­heim Fel­low­ship and the Arts and Human­i­ties Out­stand­ing Ser­vice Award. In addi­tion, she serves on the advi­sory boards of sev­eral jour­nals and arts orga­ni­za­tions and has been a ple­nary speaker at a vari­ety of dis­tin­guished venues, includ­ing, most recently, the Venice Biennale.

Dan Kam­men is a pro­fes­sor of energy at UC Berke­ley, with par­al­lel appoint­ments in the Energy and Resources Group, the Gold­man School of Pub­lic Pol­icy, and the Depart­ment of Nuclear Engi­neer­ing. He was appointed the first Envi­ron­ment and Cli­mate Part­ner­ship for the Amer­i­cas (ECPA) Fel­low by Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton in 2010. Kam­men is the found­ing direc­tor of the Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Energy Lab­o­ra­tory (RAEL), and is a coor­di­nat­ing lead author for the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He has founded or is on the board of more than ten com­pa­nies, and has served the State of Cal­i­for­nia and US fed­eral gov­ern­ment in expert and advi­sory capacities.

Dacher Kelt­ner is a pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Psy­chol­ogy at UC Berke­ley and codi­rec­tor of the Greater Good Sci­ence Cen­ter. He is the coau­thor of two text­books, as well as the best-​​selling Born to Be Good: The Sci­ence of a Mean­ing­ful Life and The Com­pas­sion­ate Instinct. He has pub­lished more than 190 sci­en­tific arti­cles, received numer­ous national prizes and grants for his research, and writ­ten for pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing the New York Times and the Wall Street Jour­nal. He was a sci­en­tific con­sul­tant on the Pixar film Inside Out.