Difficult Dialogue: “Election Year Polarization: Can we stay good neighbors?"

Mayor of Boulder (2023 - 2026)

Aaron Brockett grew up in the small college town of Sewanee, TN. He attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he majored in Music and met his wife-to-be Cherry Anderson. After 8 years of living together in Stamford, CT, Aaron and Cherry moved to Boulder in 2003. They've raised their two children in North Boulder and ran a small software development firm together for 20 years. After serving for 5 years on the city's Planning Board, Aaron was first elected to the city council in 2015, was re-elected in 2019, and became mayor in November of 2021. In his time on City Council, he has focused on climate change, housing, transportation, social justice, and racial equity.

He served for 6 years on the Denver Regional Council of Governments and is currently a member of the Boulder Racial Equity Guiding Coalition, the Metro Mayors Caucus, the Northwest Mayors and Commissioners Coalition, the Highway 119 Executive Committee and numerous other committees. As part of the city’s commitment to advancing racial equity, Mayor Brockett has attended the Advancing Racial Equity: Role of Government and Bias and Microaggression Trainings.

Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, Associate Professor, Department of Journalism

Angie Chuang is an associate professor of journalism whose research and teaching focus on race, identity and representations of Otherness. She came to academia after 13 years as a national and regional award-winning newspaper reporter at The Oregonian, The Hartford Courant , and the Los Angeles Times. At The Oregonian,  she launched one of the first beats on race and ethnicity issues and reported from Afghanistan, Vietnam, and the post-Katrina Gulf Coast. Her scholarly work on race and media has been published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly; Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism; and Communication, Culture and Critique. Her reporting in Afghanistan became the backbone of her literary journalism-memoir book, The Four Words for Home (Aquarius Press-Willow Books, 2014), which won an Independent Publishers Book Award Bronze Medal. Her media commentary has appeared in The Washington Post, The Conversation, Huffington Post, The Root, Poynter Online, The Seattle Times and The Oregonian.

In her first academic appointment at American University, Chuang was awarded the Ann S. Ferren Curriculum Design Award for creating the pilot of a mandatory first-year course on race and social identity. She has also served as a consultant on DEI issues to National Public Radio, Atlantic Media, Bloomberg Industry Group, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science; Director, Center for Critical Thought

Michaele L. Ferguson is an Associate Professor of Political Science and a President’s Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Sharing Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2012), co-editor with Lori J. Marso of W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender (Duke University Press, 2007), and co-editor with Andrew Valls of Iris Marion Young: Gender, Justice, and the Politics of Difference (Routledge, 2022). She has written numerous articles on feminist and democratic theory, including “Dead Dogma and the Limits of Feminist Political Imagination: Thinking #Metoo as Consciousness-Raising," in Theory & Event (2022), and with Alisa Kessel the satirical “Correspondence in re: Brotherhood is Powerful,” in Political Theory (2023).

She is currently finishing a book on feminist political theory, Bandita: Iris Marion Young and the Politics of Writing, Reading, and Citation, and developing a role-playing game on the Paris Commune. She is a Faculty Fellow with the CU Boulder Office of Faculty Affairs, a Member-at-Large in the Boulder Faculty Assembly, a Consulting Editor for Contemporary Political Theory, and the Special Envoy for the Reacting Consortium.