We are currently also working on digital formats should an online transmission be (still) necessary in November. In this case, this would affect the online transmission of the keynotes by Prof. Barbara Thomass and Dr. Sybille De La Rosa. In the same way, the lectures and workshops would be digitally transmitted and held.
Proposals for lectures, panels and workshops can still be sent to the organizers Kefa Hamidi (kefa.hamidi@uni-leipzig.de) and Charlotte Knorr (charlotte.knorr@uni-leipzig.de). If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
The Centre for Development Communication – Communication for Social Change (EC4SC) at the Institute for Communication and Media Science (University of Leipzig) invites you to the first interdisciplinary conference.
Venue: Institute for Communication and Media Science University of Leipzig
The starting point of the conference is the by now widely discussed assumption that the German society is polarized. Opponents and supporters of the plural democracy face each other in hostile factions and argue about the fundamentals of their future co-existence. This polarization process also goes hand in hand with the pluralization of the ‘public sphere‘, whereby we understand the term ‘public sphere’ here as a “societal negotiation space” that is constituted of everyday communication processes between individuals (micro level), (un-)organized collective and cooperative actors (meso level) as well as a complex, mostly political and mass media level (macro level).
For the conference, we want to draw on the approach of Communication for Social Change (C4SC) to observe the concrete impact and forms of appearances of this pluralization of the public. C4SC has been applied only recently in Germany’s research and the practice field (Hamidi & Mielke-Möglich 2019). It is understood as a public and private process of dialogue in which individuals may and should define themselves as to how a societal transformation in the direction of a sustainable change and societal cohesion rather than polarization can be promoted.
Three levels are seen as essential for the sustainable development in C4SC: the micro level of individuals (Social and Behavior Change Communication), the meso level of communities and organizations and the political macro level. On all three levels C4SC can be understood as the path as well as the normative goal for a public: the members of a society are going to be involved in the transformation process to create and constitute a public sphere in a participative way.