• Benjamin H. Bratton and Andreas Reckwitz open the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium on 6 October
• Theme for the international media conference: strategies out of the permanent crisis
• M100 Media Award at the Castle Theatre in the New Palace, Potsdam
Potsdam, 11 August 2021. No other occurrence has changed and tested politics, society and the media worldwide as much as Covid-19 has. The lessons we need to learn from the pandemic in order to make our democracies more resilient is the theme of this year’s M100 Sanssouci Colloquium. Entitled “From Crisis in Perpetuity to Democratic Resilience”, the international media conference will take place using a hybrid format on 6 October at the Castle Theatre in the New Palace in Potsdam.
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The conference will be opened by the renowned American sociologist and publicist Benjamin H. Bratton, who analyses the causes and consequences of bad political, systemic and human decisions in his current book, “The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-pandemic World”, promoting a radical rethink of post-pandemic politics and arguing the case for positive biopolitics.
The second part, which will take place in the Schlosstheater Potsdam with an audience, will be introduced by Prof. Dr Andreas Reckwitz. In his lecture, he will address the question: What can be done on the level of policy to strengthen the resilience of a society? Reckwitz is Professor of General Sociology and Cultural Sociology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His book “The Society of Singularities” was awarded the Bavarian Book Prize in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Non-Fiction Book Prize at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2018. In 2019, he received the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation.
Mike Schubert, Lord Mayor of the State Capital Potsdam and Chairman of the M100 Advisory Board: “Taking the theme of the post-pandemic world, the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium will once again be reflecting on and discussing a current connection to a real-life situation. Our actions were, are and will be influenced by a pandemic, the likes of which has never been seen in our modern world before. We will be discussing what we can learn from it and how we can shape the future together under the ongoing pandemic conditions. The hybrid format with digital discussions on the one hand and face-to-face events with guests attending online on the other as well as a livestream of the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium could become a new standard and is a result of the pandemic.”
Around 100 media makers and opinion leaders from Europe and the USA will discuss the resilience of our democracy to crises, (post-) coronavirus leadership, the relationship between politics, science and the media, the reasons for an increase in anti-democratic, autocratic forms of rule as well as the responsibility and current challenges faced by the media under these complex and difficult circumstances.
The results of three digital Strategic Roundtable events running in parallel will be presented in the afternoon of 6 October on stage at the baroque Schlosstheater in the New Palace in Potsdam and will be discussed with an audience both present at the event and connected online. A Special Talk with two guests on the theme of “The totalitarian temptation” is also planned.
In the evening, again at the Schlosstheater, the 17th M100 Media Award will also be presented to a personality who champions democracy, freedom of opinion and freedom of the press. This year’s awardee will be announced soon.
The programme items in the Schlosstheater will be streamed live at www.m100potsdam.org.
A current overview of the participants can be found here.
M100 is an initiative of Potsdam Media International e.V., which takes place in conceptual cooperation with the Institute for Media and Communication Policy (IfM) and is mainly funded by the City of Potsdam. Further sponsors are the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the German Foreign Office, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. Cooperation partners are the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, Reporters Without Borders (RoG), Human Rights Watch and the Association of German Newspaper Publishers (VDZ). Sponsor is medienlabor.
