Susanne Lang

"after years in academia, public service and business, I connect dots between corporate citizenship, civil society, and democracy with a non profit startup."

Brandon Jourdan

Brandon Jourdan is an award-winning independent filmmaker, journalist, and writer. His film, the July War, is based on the 2006 war in Lebanon and the consequences of the war. Jourdan has contributed to the NY Times, CNN, Babelgum, Reuters, Deep Dish TV, Democracy Now!, the Independent Media Center, Now with Bill Moyers, Foreign Exchange, and Free Speech Television. He is currently based in the Netherlands, where he is working on a film about reactions to the financial crisis.

• activism,
• video activism

Marianne Maeckelbergh

Marianne Maeckelbergh is Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She is author of The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy (Pluto Press, 2009) and is a member of the World Financial Crisis Research Group.

• activism,
• street protest,
• occupy,
• tactical research

 Xnet

Xnet – Internet Freedoms

Xnet is an activist project working in fields related to digital rights and democracy: freedom of expression; net neutrality; privacy; the free circulation of culture, knowledge and information; mechanisms for transparency, participation and citizen control of power and institutions; the defense of citizen journalism for the right to know, inform and be informed; the technical, communications and legal fight against corruption; and the technopolitics understood as the practice of networking and taking action for citizen empowerment, justice and social transformation.

• network cultures,
• activism,
• infopolitics,
• net.activism,
• info-activism,
• free culture

Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean is a Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

• political science

Pavlos Hatzopoulos

Pavlos Hatzopoulos is managing editor of Re-public.

Noortje Marres

Noortje Marres is a political philosopher and researcher at the University of Amsterdam. She completed her Ph.D. thesis No Issue, No Public. Democratic deficits after the displacement of politics, at the philosophy department of the University of Amsterdam in November 2005.

Which Democracy in a Post-Political Age? 

The question that I would like to examine with you concerns the role that the new media can play in the fostering of democracy. We can discern roughly two opposite answers to that question. On one side there are those enthusiasts who argue that they provide us with the technology that will finally make it possible to realize the ideal of direct democracy under modern conditions, on the other side those detractors who see them as contributing to a further privatization of politics and as replacing rational debate by the instant expression of private prejucides, turning what ought to be public decisions into private consumer-like choices.

• infopolitics,
• democracy,
• political science