Contributors

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Host

Kristóf Szombati

Kristóf Szombati is a scholar, educator and practitioner based in Berlin. After spending a decade in the Hungarian environmental movement, he co-founded the green LMP party and was an elected member of the Steering Committee which initially led the party. He left LMP in 2011 to pursue a doctoral degree focusing on the rise of racist and authoritarian politics in rural Hungary. Since defending his PhD at the Central European University (CEU) in 2016, Kristóf has been active as both a scholar and democracy practitioner. He has published extensively on right-wing politics, taught courses on de-democratization at universities in the US and Europe, and supported a series of re-democratization initiatives in his native Hungary and more recently in Germany where he has been living since 2022. His current employer is the Humboldt University, and he is acting Editor for Political Economy at the Review of Democracy.

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Co-host

Erdem Evren

Erdem Evren is an anthropologist and translator living in Berlin. Erdem is originally from Turkey, where he studied ethnographically the AKP's rule in the rural Northeastern part of the country. His book, Bulldozer Capitalism, shows that people can accommodate their own dispossession and displacement if they are directed to negotiate, invest in, and speculate on the destruction of their built environment and nature.

Guests

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Guest

Anna Stiede

Anna Stiede, born in 1987 in Jena (GDR), is a freelance performer, moderator and curator. She combines many years of experience as a political educator and communication trainer with tools from the performing arts. In 2019 she became part of the theater collective Panzerkreuzer Rotkäppchen. 

The motor of her artistic praxis is the struggle for socio-erotic bodies. In her many years of collaboration with the Italian Istituto Istoreco (Reggio Emilia) she has collected stories of social movements through intensive work with contemporary witnesses. She is interested in the everyday life, body and machine knowledge, grey areas, marketplaces, ambiguities, time holes and mistakes. She uses theater as a method to examine social conditions, to investigate the unsayable and to try out utopias. In doing so, she explores the boundaries of the stage and the body in order to break up the relationship between the audience and the stage space.

https://annastiede.com

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Guest

Elske Rosenfeld

Elske Rosenfeld, born 1974 in Halle/S. (GDR), works in different media and formats. Her primary focus is the histories of state socialism and the revolution of 1989/90. Documents and archives are starting points for organizing spaces in which these hi/stories can come to be present.

Her works have been featured at international exhibitions, among others at the HKW, Berlin (2024); Matter of Art Biennale, Prague (2024); Goethe Institute, Moscow (2020); mumok kino, Vienna (2016); and Devi Art Foundation, Delhi (2013).

Her texts have been published in/on Berliner Tagesspiegel, Der Freitag, Berliner Hefte, Reviews in Cultural Theory and other publications.


Since 2018 she has been as a board member of the Stiftung Haus der Demokratie und Menschenrechte, a foundation dedicated to keeping the ideas of the citizens’ movements of the GDR and the 1989 revolution alive.

https://elskerosenfeld.net/

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