Thursday, 15 Oktober | 12.30 pm – 1.30 pm | Herrenhausen Palace, Auditorium | Keynote

• Prof. Dr. Paula Diehl, Professor for Political Theory, History of Ideas and Political Culture, University of Kiel

Paula Diehl aims to shed light on the role played by the ‘explosive mix’ of right-wing populism and the mass media in the current (rampant) hostility towards democracy and science amongst the general public. Why and how are the media currently contributing to the rise of populism? She will share with us her insights into the systemic affinity between populism and the mass media’s logic of attention: why is populism’s media compatibility an important yet often overlooked factor in its success? What consequences does the logic of right-wing populism have for the democratic public sphere and for political culture?

As Director of the International Populism Research Network, she takes a comparative approach to examining how our society is responding to verbal escalation and the shift in democratic self-understanding in Europe – and what role fact-based (scientific) journalism should play in this. What, for instance, should journalists know about far-right ideologemes and the systemic favouring of these in the media – and how can they take a self-critical approach to their own role so as not to become part of the right-wing populist strategy?

Finally, Paula Diehl examines the blurring of boundaries between politics, fake news and entertainment, and the resulting epistemic uncertainty that shift the approach to reality and science.

Paula Diehl (PhD Humboldt University, Berlin) is Professor for Political Theory, History of Ideas and Political Culture, and Director of the International Populism Research Network at the University of Kiel, Germany. She held fellowships and guest professorships among others at Sciences Po (Paris), École des Hautes Études, U-Penn, Institute for Advanced Studies (Bologna) and La Sapienza (Rome). Her research is dedicated to political representation and body performances, the political imaginary, democratic theory, populism, including the normalization of the far right.