Social Change through the Art of Writing

Michael Sabet is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto. His research involves putting a Bahá’í framework for governance into dialogue with political philosophy. He is a lawyer by training, having practiced constitutional litigation in Ottawa after clerking at the Supreme Court. He is currently serving as editor of the Journal of Bahá'í Studies.

Whitney White Kazemipour earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Anthropology from UCLA, specializing in psychocultural anthropology, and an A.B. in Intellectual and Cultural History from Princeton, specializing in revolution. Her dissertation investigates the impact of migration on Iranian-American mothers, and her master’s thesis argues that gender roles shifted in a Panamanian Ngäbe community due to several generations of Bahá’í belief and practice. As a Wilmette Institute faculty member, she co-teaches “Science, Religion, and the Bahá’í Faith.” Her article, “Even as the Waves of One Sea: Bahá’í Consultation’s Implicit Cultural Support for the Clash of Differing Opinions,” was recently published in the Journal of Bahá’í Studies. As an academic writing coach for over a decade, she has coached several hundred professors and graduate students through the process of writing dissertations, journal articles, and books.

Michael Karlberg is a professor of Communication Studies at Western Washington University. His interdisciplinary scholarship examines prevailing conceptions of human nature, power, social organization, and social change – and their implications for the pursuit of peace and justice. He authored the books Beyond the Culture of Contest and Constructing Social Reality, along with many related journal articles, book chapters, and essays.

Derik Smith is chair of the Department of Literature at Claremont McKenna College, and is an affiliate faculty in the Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies at the Claremont Colleges.  His work focuses on American literary culture, with a particular interest in poetry. His current scholarship addresses African American poetry and intellectual history, as well as the connection between critical race studies and the Baha’i Faith. His work has appeared in many publications, and he is the author of Robert Hayden In Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Era, which was awarded the 2019 book of the year prize by the College Language Association.  Since 2012, in New York and California, Smith has been teaching courses in and about American prisons. He is currently a faculty representative on the working group of the Justice Education Initiative at the Claremont Colleges.  He is the acting director of the Wilmette Institute, a distance education provider with a focus on the discourse of social transformation.