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In her role as director of Lawyers for Justice in Libya, Elham Saudi has worked on fact finding missions connected with investigations into alleged human rights violations in Libya and advised a number of Libyan, European and international bodies in relation to the 2011 conflict in her native country. She has recently accompanied a team of Libyan lawyers and social activists to over 35 locations across Libya in order to engage members of the public in discussions about the upcoming constitutional drafting process.  

Suzanne Desan is Vilas-Shinners Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison, with particular interest in early modern France and the French Revolution.  Her research covers popular politics and political activism, especially gender; family; the Enlightenment; the transnational circulation of ideas, people, and practices, popular culture and religion. She is the author of several books including The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France and The French Revolution in Global Perspective, co-edited with Lynn Hunt and William Nelson. 

John Ralston Saul is an award-winning essayist and novelist, perhaps best known for his philosophical trilogy - Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense and The Unconscious Civilization.  He is also the general editor of a series of 18 biographies that reinterprets important Canadian figures for a contemporary audience by pairing well-known Canadian writers with significant historical, political and artistic figures from 1850 onwards. A long-time champion of freedom of expression, Saul was elected President of PEN International in October 2009.  

Suzanne Desan says that everyone should write down a birthday of one of their grandparents - and their own - and then try to find out what happened on those two dates. That could be what political conflicts and wars were going on, what were people worrying about at the time, what were their pastimes, what did they eat? The point is to try and use history to compare your own life with the lives of your ancestors. You can start with the minutiae of life and gradually build up a bigger picture and bigger questions – are you more free than your grandparents? Do you have more control over your life than them?

We’ll be looking up at distant stars, and looking down at earth from space, attempting to identify what reality is made of.  With cosmologist Max Tegmark, artist Mishka Henner and archaeologist Sarah Parcak.