Eline Severs, assistant professor at the Department of Political Science of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), will be the guest speaker at the third EDMO BELUX Lunch Lecture on 16 May from 13:00 to 14:00.
Her research is in the field of democratic theory. She is particularly interested in democratic representation, the relationship between civil society and democratic governance, citizens’ conceptions of democracy and what it means to organise democratic inclusion. Her research on the legitimacy of representative democracies aims to shed light on the meaning of the so-called crisis of representation in contemporary democracies. She studies (through interviews, focus groups and the study of everyday political discourse) how elected representatives and citizens make sense of their expectations and disappointments with representative democracy.
In her lecture, Eline will present the contribution she prepared for the recent VUB Poincaré book on truth(s). She reviews the existing literature on the decadence of truth or post-truth regimes. She rejects the argument that the decline of truth is a consequence of postmodernism and argues that fact-checking and civic education efforts alone will not reverse the trend. What is needed is to restore trust as the foundation of inter-subjective truths.
Register here!
The EDMO BELUX lunch lectures are a series of informal meetings on research topics such as disinformation, hate speech, polarisation and digitalisation. At each conference, a guest speaker presents his or her work in a 30-minute talk, after which we open the discussion. The lectures are held online and can be attended by anyone interested who has registered in advance.
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Watch the recording of the first webinar in the series, entitled “Measuring and defining informational vulnerability: a proposal at the intersection of psychology, political science and media studies“, on EDMO BELUX’s YouTube channel