UTAH DEMOCRACY PROJECT PERSONNEL

Brian D. Birch is Director of the Religious Studies Program and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University. After completing Bachelors and Masters degrees in Philosophy from the University of Utah, he attended Claremont Graduate University, where he received a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion and Theology in 1998. His research interests center around the philosophical, theological, and ethical dimensions of religious diversity. He has served as acting director of the Center for the Study of Ethics and editor of Teaching Ethics. He currently serves as chair of the annual Religion and the Humanities Conference at UVU. In addition to receiving the Board of Trustees Award of Excellence and Teacher of the Year honors, he has organized numerous conferences and symposia including the Democracy Project for the Center for the Study of Ethics in 2003-04.

Elaine E. Englehardt is Distinguished Professor Ethics, Professor of Philosophy and Special Assistant to the President at UVU. For the past thirty years, she has taught courses in philosophy, communication and integrated studies. She has served as an administrator including Vice President for Scholarship and Outreach; Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean and Department Chair. She has twenty continuous years in grants from national agencies: National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education. She earned a doctorate degree in Communication and Philosophy from the University of Utah; Masters and Bachelors Degrees from Brigham Young University in Communication.

W. Neil Evans is the President of Capitol U, a non-profit civic education association, and holds The Thomas Bahnnson and Anne Bassett Stanley Professorship in Ethics and Integrity at the Virginia Military Institute. In his work with Capitol U, he has helped students from around the country understand better the law and policy making processes and the critical role citizens play in those processes. From 1997 to 2002 he was program manager, assistant counsel and legislative counsel to the National Parks Conservation Association. He earned a Juris Doctorate from the Washington and Lee University School of Law, a Masters of Studies in Environmental Law from Vermont Law School, and a baccalaureate degree in History from the University of Utah.

David R. Keller is Director of the Center for Ethics and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley State College. He has taught in the Philosophy, Humanities, Integrated Studies, and Environmental Studies programs at UVU since 1996, and has served as Director since 1999. He earned a doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Georgia, a Masters degree in Philosophy at Boston College, and a double English-Philosophy baccalaureate degree at Franklin & Marshall College. He served as Editor of Teaching Ethics from Fall 2005-Fall 2007.

Don LaVange is Program Coordinator for the Center for the Study of Ethics at UVU. His current work focuses on coordination of multiple events with both faculty, student and outside speakers, office and budget management, and event and public relations conception, design, production, and promotion utilizing print, net and web 2.0 media. He is a software specialist with experience in creating websites and has experience using html and css open standards and a photographer who has a large gallery of imagery event photography and candid portraiture.

Will M. McKinnon is the Director of Studios and Engineering at UVU. He has worked in the television production field for the past 14 years in various roles including video and audio engineer, writer, director and producer. As a freelancer he has worked for the major television networks, including NBC, FOX, and ESPN. At UVSC he leads a team that produces over 200 hours of video annually. Will earned both an Associates degree in Electronic Communications Technology and Digital Media from UVU.

Michael Minch is the Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program and Associate Professor of Philosophy at UVU. He is the co-editor of Living Ethics (Wadsworth, 2008) and the author of The Democratic Theory of Michael Oakeshott (forthcoming, Academic Imprint, 2008). His Doctorate in Political Thought is from a program co-owned by the Political Science and Philosophy Departments at the University of Utah. His primary sub-field is in International Relations. He holds a Masters degree in Theology and baccalaureate in History. He works in the relationships among democratic theory and politics, green political theory, theology, and theories of justice and peace-building.

Karen Mizell is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UVU. She received her Masters. and Doctorate. in Philosophy from the University of Oklahoma and her B.A. in Philosophy from the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. Prior to teaching at UVU, she taught at Brigham Young University and Clayton State College in Atlanta, Georgia. Her current research interests focus on Philosophy of Childhood, Philosophy for Children, and Service-Learning and has presented papers at UNESCO sponsored conferences in each of those areas. The State of Utah awarded her its 2007 Campus Compact Faculty Award for excellence in Service-Learning.

Jeffrey S. Nielsen is founder and director of the Democracy House Project, a nonprofit educational initiative to educate citizens in political literacy. He is a trained moderator, and issue framer, for the Kettering Foundation’s National Issues Forum Institute, which convenes and moderates public dialogues on public policy issues of importance and interest to elected officials and ordinary citizens. He is an organizational consultant and author of the book The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations published by Davies-Black Publishers (2004), which offers a new paradigm in peer-based management. Currently he is an adjunct professor in the philosophy departments of both Westminster College of Salt Lake City and UVSC. He is currently completing his doctorate in Philosophy at Boston College, where he earned a Masters degree in Philosophy. He double majored in Economics and German at Weber State University, where he received his baccalaureate degree.