Series of Talks »Blick über den Tellerrand«

Blick über den Tellerrand (Thinking Outside the Box) in December 2024
»Democracy 2.0? – Democratic Politics Under the Conditions of a Digitized Public Sphere«

Thursday, December 5th 2024
5pm – 6:30pm

The lecture will be held in German.

Digital media have fundamentally changed the political public sphere in recent decades: Social media allows us all to present our political views to a basically unlimited audience, reading newspapers has been replaced by regular consumption of video content, especially among young people, and successful election campaigns are characterized by the fact that they have increasingly shifted their activities to the »net«. But what do these developments mean for democracy? Do the new communication options increase citizens' political engagement? Or do they primarily encourage polarization and disenchantment with politics? Was the quality of the political public sphere higher before the »digital turn« than it is today? The lecture provides an overview of the democratic potential and challenges of the digital world of communication. 

About the Speaker

Speaker Prof. Dr. Claudia Ritzi studied communication science, political science and foreign trade at the Universities of Hohenheim and Stuttgart from the winter semester 2002/2003. After graduating, she worked as a research assistant in the Department of Political Theory at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg. She spent the summer of 2010 as a visiting researcher at Stanford University. In 2013, she received her doctorate with a thesis on »Political Public Spheres in Post-Democracy«. In 2015, she worked at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) in the Department of Democracy and Democratization. From 2016-2018, she was a junior professor of political theory at the University of Münster. Since October 2018, she has been teaching as Professor of Political Theory and History of Ideas at the University of Trier and is Deputy Chair of the Board of the German Political Science Association (DVPW). Since 01.10.21, Ms. Ritzi has been Senate Commissioner for Protection against Sexual Harassment at Trier University. In April 2023, she also took over the management of the Department of Political Science. 

The event will be moderated by Prof. Dr. Karl-Heinz Küfer. He is the speaker for the Felix Klein Center for Mathematics and head of the »Optimization« division and »Optimization in the Life Sciences« department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM.

Participation Options:       

1. On site in the lecture hall of the Fraunhofer ITWM,
   Fraunhofer-Platz 1, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany  
2. By video conference via Microsoft Teams: https://s.fhg.de/tellerrand-2024-12 

Technical Hints

After you have clicked on the Microsoft Teams link, a browser window will open – if you are not yet using Microsoft Teams – and you will be asked How would you like to join your Microsoft Teams meeting? You can use Microsoft Teams via a browser (e.g. Chrome) or you can download the Windows app to your desktop or install the Microsoft Teams app on your smartphone or tablet.

»Blick über den Tellerrand« (Thinking Outside the Box) is an interdisciplinary lecture series of the Felix Klein Center for Mathematics with changing topics.