Thomas Sage Pedersen is a writer, consultant, and public speaker whose work focuses on culture, leadership, and the human capacities required for meaningful social change. He works with organizations and communities navigating complexity, uncertainty, and transformation, helping people strengthen dialogue, trust, and collective responsibility. Thomas is the founder of Everyone’s Music School, Speak For Change Podcast, and co-founder of Ignite Nexus, and has served in leadership and advisory roles across arts, education, and community-based organizations. His work bridges personal reflection with systemic thinking, grounded in the belief that our institutions reflect how we relate to one another.

Staying With Discomfort: Why Our Capacity for Uncertainty Shapes Our Systems
The ideals of the Enlightenment gave us things like freedom of expression, reason, and democracy, values that were originally practiced through debate, disagreement, and the willingness to be challenged. In our current moment, shaped by polarization, cultural reactivity, and social media systems that reward certainty and anger, those ideals feel increasingly fragile. This talk explores what it actually takes to live these values now by looking at an often overlooked dimension: our capacity to stay present with discomfort, ambiguity, and not knowing. Many of our most persistent systemic problems are sustained not only by policy or ideology, but by how quickly we retreat into fear or defensiveness when uncertainty arises. By examining our relationship to discomfort at personal, professional, and collective levels, this talk asks what capacities we must cultivate if Enlightenment ideals are to remain alive, adaptive, and capable of supporting real dialogue and systemic change.

Thomassagepedersen.com 

Ignitenexus.co

Podcast: Speak For Change

Instagram: Instagram.com/thomassagepedersen

Linktree: Linktr.ee/thomassagepedersen

Linkedin: Linkedin.com/in/thomassagepedersen

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Beati Quorum is a hybrid vocal ensemble featuring emerging professional and auditioned volunteer singers dedicated to bringing a distinguished choral experience to the South Bay Area. With a focus on a cappella choral music, Beati Quorum’s repertoire spans the gamut of choral music from medieval to contemporary. The group additionally brings experimental music-making to the table by creating sonar-scapes. Beati Quorum was founded by artistic director and conductor, Crista Berryessa, B.M. Vocal Performance, M.M. Chorał Conducting. Crista brings a unique blend of traditions in her approach to choral directing. Hailing from Los Angeles with a background in Estonian runic song, she approaches her directing by way of the intersection of mind and spirit. She also directs the community chorus Pacific Voices which specializes in community engagement, and  the San Francisco Estonian Choir. If you are interested in singing or joining in any of these endeavors, please email her at cristaberryessa@gmail.com

For Night of Ideas 2026, Beati Quorum will feature guest artist Sarah Cruse as they collectively explore what it means to engage in enlightenment in today’s uncertain world. 

Sarah Cruse has learned to come home to the moment.  As a young repressed and depressed adult, trying to find her way out of patterns of personal and familial trauma, she found poetry and discovered the healing power of embodied truth, authentic voice and creative expression.  Sarah now supports people and communities in activating their own inner creative pathways.  She is currently a practitioner of energetic medicine, sound healing and trauma repatterning as well as host to ‘Yaya’s Kitchen’; a monthly community music event dedicated to the emergent freestyle. Follow her at @infiniteyayah

Juan Ospina is a Colombian flautist, producer, composer, and educator, and the creative director behind Olemano. Originally from Bucaramanga, Colombia, Juan uses the flute as a lead voice, blending Latin American roots, improvisation, and electronic textures to create an energetic and contemporary sound. 

Juan has performed internationally in concert halls, festivals, and multimedia productions. He holds a Bachelor of Music from the National University of Colombia and a Flute Performance degree from Texas Christian University, and has performed with major orchestras including the Dallas Opera and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Bogotá. 

As an educator with El Sistema Santa Cruz, Juan integrates performance, music production, and social-emotional learning. He is currently focused on composing, recording, performing original music with Olemano, and collaborating with multidisciplinary artists. 

live performance

Olemano

Olemano Spotify

AL-EK is an audiovisual collaboration creating visceral experiences through synchronized soundscapes, and eclectic-sourced visuals. The project features a dynamic foundation of synthesized electronic sound interwoven with live music. The soundscape fuels a varied background energy expressed through imagery and motion. AL-EK inspires curious dialogue through warped perceptions and sensory provocations.

Instagram: @al_ek_com

Gina Athena Ulysse (b. 1966, Haiti/United States) is an artist-scholar, Professor of Humanities, and Founding Director of the Rasanblaj Praxis Project Lab (RPPL) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Working at the intersection of art, writing, and critical inquiry, her practice explores geopolitics, historical representation, aesthetics, and the spiritual dimensions of everyday Black diasporic life. Central to her work is rasanblaj — a methodology of gathering ideas, things, people, and spirits.

Over the past two decades, Ulysse has performed internationally at venues including the British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Cabaret Voltaire, Gorki Theatre, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and MoMA Salon. She has held residencies at the University at Buffalo, Oregon State University, the University of Zurich, and the Bogliasco Foundation Study Center in Italy. She participated in the Biennale of Sydney (2020), the Biennale de Dakar (2024), and is a 2025 MacDowell Fellow. Her publications include Why Haiti Needs New Narratives (2015), Because When God is Too Busy (2017), and A Call to Rasanblaj (2023), along with the forthcoming A Year and A Day (2025).

Ronaldo V. Wilson is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, academic, and the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, and Lucy 72. His latest books are Carmelina: Figures and Virgil Kills: Stories. He is the editor of three special issues of hybrid and experimental work in Interim: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics; and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. He has shown work and performed most recently at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and The Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard. The recipient of numerous fellowships, including Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Wilson is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, where he directs the Creative Writing Program, and serves on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program; principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies); and affiliate faculty member of DANM (Digital Arts and New Media).

Libia Posada is a multidisciplinary artist, trained as a physician and surgeon at the University of Antioquia. Posada’s art is influenced by her medical training, going beyond a fascination with representations of the purely organic or biological to think of the body as a site for the staging of human experience, both individual and collective, and a territory closely connected to the geographical one. In Posada’s artwork, the individual body who passes through clinical spaces—hospitals, asylums—bears the evidence, and the symptoms, of broader social illness: collective, historical, cultural, political.

Libia Posada’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her solo exhibitions include Definición del Horizonte (Definition of the Horizon), a review of her last twenty years of work, Museum of Modern Art of Medellín; Pasado Tiempo y Futuro: Arte en Colombia siglo XXI (Past, Present and Future: Art in Colombia in the 21st Century); Medellín una historia colombiana (Medellín: A Colombian Story), Musée Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France; Evidencia Clínica: Retratos (Clinical Evidence: Portraits), National Museum of Colombia (2009) and Museum of Antioquia (2007); as well as her nomination for the Premio Luis Caballero (Luis Caballero Prize, 2011) and Signos Cardinales (Cardinal Signs, 2009).

Adela Najarro is a poet with a social consciousness who is working on a novel. She serves on the board of directors for Círculo de poetas and Writers and works with the Latine/x community nationwide, promoting the intersection of creative writing and social justice. Her extended family left Nicaragua and arrived in San Francisco during the 1940s; after the fall of the Somoza regime, the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area. She is the author of four poetry collections: Split Geography, Twice Told Over, My Childrens, and Volcanic Interruptions, a chapbook that includes Janet Trenchard’s artwork. The 2024 Int’l Latino Book Awards designated Volcanic Interruptions as an Honorable Mention in the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award category. The California Arts Council has recognized her as an established artist for the Central California Region and appointed her as an Individual Artist Fellow.

From Body to Word: Finding Enlightenment Through Poetry
Discover how poetry contributes to our understanding of gripping societal issues, such as immigration and intimate partner violence, and how the transformative power of language leads to healing and empowerment. Join Adela Najarro for a reading and discussion of poems from Variations in Blue (Red Hen Press, 2025). The poems in this collection reimagine Nicaragua as a homeland set in a volcanic landscape and address the aftermath of domestic violence.  As Fred Arroyo states, “Adela’s poems are alive, elemental, and they set us on fire, burn down the foundations of our being, to help us experience what it’s like to be alive.” Poetry reading and discussion, followed by Q & A.
marketing@redhen.org

Kyle is a Continuing Lecturer in Philosophy at UCSC, where he regularly teaches topics in moral and political philosophy, logic, and the philosophy of law. He is also an active public philosopher with the Center for Public Philosophy. His work includes running programs for elementary school children, founding and directing the Norcal high school ethics bowl, consulting with businesses and foundations, and teaching incarcerated students. Outside of work, in addition to helping to raise two children on the Westside of Santa Cruz, he enjoys singing with the Santa Cruz Chorale. See him speak as part of TEDX Santa Cruz here.

Contesting the Rule of Law
No Enlightenment concept has been more in the U.S. public mindset recently than ‘the rule of law.’ Many believe that the rule of law is under profound threat from a corrupt, lawless administration. At the same time, others voted for this administration because of a desire to see laws, particularly immigration laws, more rigidly enforced. I will present a philosophical account of the rule of law, as an essentially contested concept, to try to make sense of these divergent viewpoints and to distinguish between regular democratic political disagreements and existential democratic threats.

Dr. Iris Oved is the founder and director of The Paradox Lab, a San Francisco-based educational center that brings the joys and tools of philosophical inquiry to kids and kids at heart. She is also an active researcher in philosophy and cognitive science, specializing in learning in children, scientists, and robots. Learn more about her work at ParadoxLab.org. 

Mind the Gap: Masks, Goggles, and the Search for Authenticity
This session will explore our mental representations of the world and each other in this increasingly virtual/AI age. After a brief talk by philosopher and cognitive scientist Iris Oved, participants will engage in a salon-style discussion about the masks that we wear and the perceptual, linguistic, cognitive, and digital devices that filter our access to the people and world around us. When do these filters facilitate authentic connection and when do they interfere? Together we will explore the value of authentic connection and how we can create a future that brings us closer to each other and to reality.

https://philpeople.org/profiles/iris-oved
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100069821315401&mibextid=wwXIfr
https://www.instagram.com/theparadoxlab

Jean-Paul Gazzaneo-Duarte is a first year Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is currently interested in Metaphysics, Latin American Philosophy, and especially the intersection between the two. 

Identity Under Oppression: Lessons from Latin American Philosophy. 
One of the promises of the Enlightenment was liberty. Three hundred years later, what can we make of liberty in the United States if the government continues to take it away? I propose that we look to 19th- and 20th-century Latin America for lessons in resistance and self-identification. In particular, the writings of Venezuelan philosopher Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla on identity provide us with a way to find hope in the face of oppression.

Sam Kahn is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at UC Santa Cruz. In his philosophical research, Sam asks about the nature of human social subjectivity, including our essential interdependence, historical situatedness, and the psychological mechanisms that embed us in social contexts. Before coming to UCSC, he taught middle school humanities for five years in Dallas, TX and East Palo Alto, CA. In addition to his role as a TA at the university, Sam still teaches Philosophy for Children (P4C) at the local elementary school (supported by the Center for Public Philosophy).

Moving Beyond the Standard Story of the ‘Attention Crisis’
There is much talk about how smartphones and social media apps are harming our attention. The standard story—inherited through an “Enlightenment” conception of what it means to be human—says that the harm of the ‘attention crisis’ is in how our technology causes us to lose our autonomy; attentional decisions are no longer up to us. Without completely abandoning this familiar picture, this talk strives to move beyond the standard story. We will ask questions like: Can we ever really have ‘attentional autonomy’? What even is attention? What if instead of theorizing about the sources of attentional decisions, we focus on its situatedness, habituation, and phenomenology? What are the deeper moral harms that the standard story obscures? I will make the case that a deeper harm of the ‘attention-crisis’ is a collective distortion about the world and its value.

Brigitte Wittmer is a facilitator, performer, and movement visionary whose work investigates how bodies think, how images move us, and how technology can become a partner rather than a tool. With over two decades of experience across cultures and disciplines, she approaches movement as a form of inquiry, a language that bridges the sensory, the relational, and the philosophical.

As the pioneer of Liquid Leading, she reimagines partner dance beyond fixed roles, inviting fluid authorship and shared perception. Her interdisciplinary collaborations – including projects with the Rio-based tech‑art collective Kinetic.Lab and performances for Swissnex Brasil – explore how digital environments and human presence co-create meaning in real time.

In her workshop-performance formats, she invites audiences into a living dialogue of embodied intelligence, mutual attunement, and relational presence.

www.instagram.com/b_moving

Dr. Jeanne Proust studied Humanities, Philosophy, and Visual Arts in Bordeaux, Berlin, and Paris and has taught philosophy in the U.S. for more than fifteen years. She currently serves as Vice President of the Public Philosophy Network and Academic Coordinator at UC Santa Cruz’s Crown College, leading tech ethics education. A former director of the Center for Public Philosophy, she spearheaded and manages the Santa Cruz Night of Ideas program. Her work spans ethics, feminism, and aesthetics. She also runs a philosophical counseling practice and organizes immersive philosophical retreats in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Philosophical Counseling

Philosophical Retreats