Tara Dickman is a community organizer, educator, and strategist with over 15 years of experience building civic power in France and Europe. Founder of Le Next Level and co-founder of both Démocratiser La Politique and Stop le Contrôle au Faciès — a grassroots-led, multisector coalition that successfully challenged discriminatory policing before the Paris Court of Appeal and the European Court of Human Rights — she teaches community organizing at ESSEC Business School and has served as a Teaching Fellow for Marshall Ganz’s Executive Education class at Harvard Kennedy School. Her work asks not only what democracy promises, but who gets to shape it.
Artist-researcher and associated professor at the National School of Architecture of Marseille, Matthieu Duperrex has been working for over 15 years on urban, landscape, and ecological issues. With a background in literature, he holds degrees in philosophy, economics, sociology, and visual arts. His prolific and acclaimed scientific output lies in the fields of ecological humanities and the anthropology of technology and infrastructure. Performances, installations, films, photography, multimedia publications, curating ideas, literary narratives… His creations transcend disciplinary boundaries and are always based on field research into anthropized environments and sentinel territories. He is interested in the mineral turn, complex socio-hydrosystems, feral dynamics, critical zone sciences, and landscape aesthetics. During his stay as part of the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program, Matthieu Duperrex will conduct a field investigation entitled “How to Build a Marsh?”, analyzing various wetland ecological restoration projects in Louisiana. He is hosted by the LSU Coastal Ecosystem Design Studio.
David Edwards is the Policy Advisor for Neighborhoods for the City of Atlanta and the Inaugural Director of the Center for Urban Research at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He served as Chief Executive Officer at Purpose Built Communities, a non-profit firm partnering with local leaders to revitalize distressed urban neighborhoods. In addition, Mr. Edwards served on IBM’s Global Smarter Cities team, as Senior Policy Advisor to Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, as a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Atlanta, and as Assistant Provost for Academic Affairs at Columbia University. He initially began his career at the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President in Washington, D.C.