The recent attack on the U.S. Capitol and incidents in other Western democracies – such as the attempt to storm the Reichstag building in Berlin in August 2020 – demonstrate how fragile our democracies are. Are the aspiration and promise of our liberal constitutions an illusion? How resilient are our democratic institutions and practices in the digital age? Can they adapt?
1014 and the American Council on Germany discussed these questions with Pam Campos-Palma, Political Strategist and Consultant, and Alexander Sängerlaub, Director of futur eins. Moderated by Nicholas Boston.
Pam Campos-Palma is a visionary political strategist focused on democratizing national security, building progressive coalitions for racial, and economic justice, and defeating white nationalism and wars at home and across borders. A trusted adviser to lawmakers, think tanks, and campaigns, she is known for expertly bridging grassroots and grasstop worlds and bringing global and security policy to life through the leadership development and winning organizing of military members and veterans dedicated to human and civil rights through her project Vets for the People. A former military intelligence analyst with time in Germany, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq and Afghanistan, Pam is passionate about strengthening democracies through transatlantic partnerships and currently Pam serves as Director of Peace & Security for the Working Families Party. She was named a 2019 Atlantik-Brücke Young Leader, a "Top 40 Under 40 Latinos in Foreign Policy" by Huffington Post, and a 2018 Champion of Change by the UN. , is a Defense Council member of the Truman National Security Project, an Advisory Board member of Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security (WCAPS), and was a member of the 2019 Women’s March Steering Committee.
Alexander Sängerlaub is Director of future eins, an organization at the interface between politics, media, science and civil society. He has been dealing with digital public spheres for a long time and preferably in a holistic way. As a research assistant at the University of Hamburg and the Free University of Berlin from an academic perspective, in 2014 with the founding of Kater Demos, the utopian political magazine from a journalistic point of view as editor-in-chief and in his work at the Berlin agency Blumberry from a campaign and PR perspective. Since 2017, he has helped build up the “Strengthening the Digital Public Sphere” department at the Berlin think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, where he led projects on disinformation (“Fake News”), fact-checking and digital news literacy.
Alexander Sängerlaub is primarily interested in the evolution of our democratic information architectures in the digital age, whether through journalistic innovations such as Constructive Journalism or the question of how we as a knowledge society can use the full potential of digitization for our public spheres as well. On these topics he is also regularly active as a speaker (e.g. Goethe Institutes San Francisco & Seattle, Streitraum, ARD/ZDF Media Academy), host (e.g. EU Commission) or expert (e.g. German Bundestag).
He studied journalism, psychology and political communication at the Free University in Berlin and taught at the University of the Arts, the University of Applied Sciences Berlin and also at the Free University Berlin. His never written dissertation entitled “Who needs journalists when you can have robots?” on journalism and artificial intelligence was always interrupted by life (including Kater Demos).
Nicholas Boston, Ph.D., is associate professor of journalism and media studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and visiting professor of communications at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. His research is at the intersection of digital media, migration, and identity. He holds a doctorate in sociology from Cambridge University, a master’s from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and a B.A. in English and communications from McGill University. He is the recipient of a 2016 DAAD visiting professorship at the Freie Universität in Berlin, where he taught in the Institute for Media and Communication Studies. He has also been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, a 2006 recipient of the McCloy Fellowship in Art to Berlin from the American Council on Germany, and Michaelmas Visiting Scholar in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge, where he is a member of the advisory board of the LGBTQ+ Programme. His most recent journalism and commentary were published in BBC News, the Independent, Le Monde Diplomatique, Notes from Poland, The Root, and Vogue. His article on August Agboola Browne, a Nigerian-born musician who is celebrated in Poland for being the only Black participant in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 was named one of BBC Africa's “Best of 2020.”