Democracy & Vulnerability: Recaps by the Student Council
The Wende Museum, dublab radio and the Thomas Mann House are excited to announce that they are continuing their monthly virtual program series! This year’s series focuses on the new annual topic of the Thomas Mann House, Democracy & Vulnerability.
The Student Council consists of a team of highly engaged, talented, and diverse high school, undergraduate, and graduate students who invite prominent guest speakers to discuss topics relating to art, culture, politics, and society. In conversation with academics, journalists, politicians, and artists, the students will explore the various threats to democratic institutions and principles worldwide, as well as strategies to potentially overcome these threats.
Democratic processes are dynamic, inclusive, and human-centered but at times also messy, arbitrary, and even contrary to democracy itself. How should a democracy deal with its own vulnerabilities? What are the responsibilities of a democracy toward the most vulnerable in its populace? How do democracies need to evolve to deal successfully with increasing global levels of ecological, geo-political, and economic precarity? How much vulnerability can a democracy endure?
Join us for our February interview with Thomas Mann Fellow, journalist, author, and moderator Friedemann Karig, whose work focuses on protest movements in Germany and the United States. Episode 3 will take place on March 27th at 4 p.m. online. More information can be found here.
Watch all previous student council interview on our YouTube channel or listen to them as podcasts on dublab radio!
February: Friedemann Karig
For the second episode of the Democracy and Vulnerability series, the Student Council spoke with the Thomas Mann House fellow Friedemann Karig, a journalist and author from Berlin whose recent work focuses on the histories and practices of protest movements. Karig became interested in the topic during the 2019 climate protests that swept across Germany, wondering what kind of effects such protests could actually achieve, whether certain tactics resulted in more policy changes than others, and how protesters sustained their pursuit of political transformation. This research has become a book, Was ihr wollt: Wie Protest wirklich wirkt [What You Want: How Protest Really Works], that was just released on March 14, 2024.
This is not Karig’s first book, however, and the Council opened up the conversation by asking him how his creativity and love of writing influences his politics. He responded that he lives off of stories, that they nourish him and shape his worldview. Stories, he said, train the human “muscle” of fantasy, which he described as the ability to see the world as it could be. Hope and fantasy are thus deeply connected, and he suggested that contemporary protest movements could benefit from a return to some of the more utopian boldness of the 1960s.
The majority of the Council’s questions invited Karig to dig a bit more deeply into his research’s findings, asking about which protest strategies seem the most effective and what advice he would give to organizers dealing with heightened cultural polarization and the growing presence of extremist ideologies in the political mainstream. Even as he emphasized the importance of maintaining a utopian vision, Karig noted that successful protests usually begin with raising awareness at a local level and adapting to each unique context, slowly breaking the status quo and helping people believe that a better future is actually possible. Karig said that generating political momentum was less about convincing one’s opponents than about persuading people in the opportunistic middle. This perspective sharpens a movement’s focus and makes change seem more achievable, an essential part of preventing burnout and cynicism.
The conversation ended with a reflection on what sources of hope Karig and the Council’s panelists turn to in their daily lives. While each answer was different, they shared a belief in the importance of community and cultivating a deep connection to all the living things that surround us. This commitment to hope was perhaps the most prominent theme in Karig’s talk, reminding listeners that although the constant news of surging extremism is both terrifying and exhausting, we do not have to give extremists the power to define what futures are imaginable, and through strategic, local actions it is possible to build solidarity and political will that can change the world for the better.
A recap by Matthew Jones
About our speaker:
Friedemann Karig is a journalist, author, and moderator from Berlin. He studied media science, politics, and economics and has written for Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, Spiegel Online, and Deutschlandfunk, among others. His nonfiction book Wie wir lieben was published by Blumenbar in 2017, followed by his debut novel Dschungel (Ullstein, 2019) and the nonfiction bestseller Erzählende Affen: Mythen, Lügen, Utopien — Wie Geschichten unser Leben bestimmen, (Ullstein, 2021). His novel Die Lügnerin will be published in September 2023 by Ullstein.
January: Sophie-Charlotte Opitz
For the very first episode in our Democracy and Vulnerability series, the Wende Museum and Thomas Mann House Student Council welcomed media scholar and curator Sophie-Charlotte Opitz. The Council opened our discussion by asking Opitz to define memory studies and its role in her work. She insightfully described the field as one that explores individual and collective perceptions of social, political, cultural, and technological shifts throughout history. Memory studies isn’t necessarily about the past, but how we use it — in this sense, memory studies holds a correlative relationship with visual culture. Evoking George Orwell’s words, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” Opitz argues that who controls the image controls society.
The Council shifted to the topic of protest art and technology, another defining focus of Opitz’s work. She connected past movements with contemporary struggles, by linking the momentous Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-Ins during the Civil Rights Movement to the more recent virtual sit-in model — in which activists simultaneously access targeted websites, causing them to crash with an overflow of traffic. During the COVID-19 lockdown and simultaneous Black Lives Matter protests, virtual sit-ins expanded into the gaming sphere, spreading such actions across games from World of Warcraft to Animal Crossing.
Deepening our reflections on technology and justice, Opitz explained how Artificial Intelligence systems often produce discriminatory patterns and materials. This is no accident, given that such programs pull from image databases and internet archives which naturally mirror our human-made visual culture — and of course, such sources are undoubtedly biased toward the representation of white males. Highlighting its need for a radical overhaul, our discussion came to the conclusion that AI can perpetuate oppressive structures given the high probability that we, as viewers, remember and internalize such content. To combat its replicable systematic silencing of marginalized narratives, Opitz stressed the dire need for creative resistance and the inclusion of global perspectives in AI advancements.
As the episode drew to a close, Council members sought Opitz’s opinion on a critical debate: Is there hope for the future of AI? Her response was less than optimistic. AI poses several concerns, including its aforementioned inclination to discriminate, its inaccessibility, and its dangerously deceptive qualities. However, not all hope is lost — Opitz recognized artists and activists who seek to revolutionize AI, such as Computational Mama, who holds accessible and educational workshops on AI artmaking, with a pointed awareness of its shortcomings.
A recap by Sara Abrahamsson.
About our speaker:
Sophie-Charlotte Opitz is a media and memory studies scholar and curator. She studied philosophy and art education at Goethe University Frankfurt and subsequently completed her doctorate. In 2019 she began her curatorial practice as a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and afterwards worked internationally as a curator and director in museums in Germany, Switzerland, and England. In addition to her monograph „Bilderregungen. Die Produktionsmechanismen zeitgenössischer Kriegsfotografie“, she regularly publishes in academic journals, exhibition catalogues, and photography books, especially on aspects of collective memory cultures and global image politics. She is a 2023 Thomas Mann Fellow. In her project, she is researching new forms of protest which strengthen political visibility during critical times.
The 2024 Student Council
Sara Abrahamsson is a fourth-year student at UCLA studying Art History and French. As a culmination of her artistic and academic interest in political graphics, Sara is currently writing her senior thesis paper on the internationalist poster art of post-revolutionary Cuba. Upon graduating, she plans to continue working in museums before pursuing graduate studies in Art History or Art Conservation.
Amy Cabrales is a First-Generation fourth-year undergraduate student at UCLA, studying Sociology and the Russian Language. She is a Mexican-American, Los Angeles native born in Lynwood, California. Her career interests include cross-cultural education via museum work or language instruction and immigrant resettlement, while her academic interests include immigrant integration and self-identity across immigrant generations. She is anticipating returning to Almaty, Kazakhstan for the 2024–25 academic year to inform these interests and advance her Russian proficiency.
Elsa Coony is a fourth-year student at the University of California, Los Angeles double majoring in Global Studies and German. She has previously worked at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as both a docent and translator and is excited to join this year’s council. In the future, she hopes to pursue a career in international development.
Biruke Dix is currently a 2nd year student at UCLA studying Applied Mathematics. He joined the Wende Student Council in 2024 and is deeply invested in the ever-changing properties of art as well as social habits. He hopes that he can create language and conversation that promotes the spread of cultural shifts and social justice.
Matthew Jones is a third-year PhD student in Claremont Graduate University’s Cultural Studies and Museum Studies program. His research currently explores how sites connected to authoritarian regimes function as pilgrimage destinations and what strategies states and institutions employ to reduce extremist attachment at these sites. He is thrilled to continue his training with the Wende Museum through this collaboration with the Thomas Mann House.
Emma Larson is a master’s student at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute of Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies. There, she focuses on the gender, social, and political history of Central Asia. Before starting at Columbia, Emma taught English in Kazakhstan with the Fulbright Program. She graduated from Williams College with degrees in History and Russian in 2021.
Zora Nelson is a current undergraduate student at New York University, where she is studying Harp Performance and Media, Culture, and Communication. As an east coaster born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she discovered the Wende Museum in the summer of 2022 and is honored to be a part of the council. With a passion for writing, Zora sees a future in storytelling to promote social justice.
Lexi Tooley is a current sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Political Science and Art History, minoring in Chinese Language and Culture. She is originally from Los Angeles, California, and attended the Archer School for Girls. Lexi has been working with the Wende Museum for the past 2 years. She looks forward to continuing the search for truth and examining the vulnerability of democracy through this program!
