Lisa Disch teaches an upper-level undergraduate course on population and environmental change and offers a course on forms of democratic politics that uses the Great Lakes Water Compact as a case for a “citizens’ jury.” She is writing a book on the contradictions between political representation and democracy that seeks to reconcile the insight that acts of representation do not merely reflect constituencies  but, rather, mobilize them with the expectation that representative democratic government must be government by "the people”—an entity that is supposed to exist independently of its representation.