This event is CANCELLED: From Slogan to Hashtag: Social Movements Yesterday and Today

Please note: The event by Marcia Chatelain and Jeanette Hofmann "From Slogan to Hashtag" on May, 7 is cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience. 

Response by and discussion with Jeanette Hofmann, WZB

Event within the WZB series "Achtung: Demokratie"

“From Slogan to Hashtag” will examine the ways that social media have transformed social movements, especially organizing, messaging, and impact. Yet, MarciaChatelain cautions us against believing that social justice work has become easier in the digital age, rather she illustrates the continuity between the strategies deployed by the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and today's most visible activist groups such as LGBTQ organizations, Black Lives Matter or MeToo.

In her research, e.g., Marcia Chatelain examines the question “When does a moment become a movement?” using the example Black Lives Matter. This movement has elicited a number of questions and debates about social change in the twenty-first century. How do grassroots movements function in the age of social media? What is their role in a democracy, and how effectively do they achieve change in legislature and general attitude? Fifty years after Martin Luther King’s death, Marcia Chatelain looks behind these new social movements, she analyses their strengths and challenges and places them in a historical context.

Unfortunately this event is cancelled!

Marcia Chatelain is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.   In addition to being a scholar, Marcia Chatelain teaches communities about a variety of topics, especially how to have difficult conversations about race and social justice. In August 2014, she created the Twitter campaign #Fergusonsyllabus in order to organize a response to the crisis in Ferguson.

Jeanette Hofmann, political scientist, is Head of the Project Group The Internet Policy Field at the WZB, Director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and Professor of Internet Politics at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2017, she is also Principal Investigator of the research groups “Democracy and digitization” and “Quantification and social regulation” at the newly established Weizenbaum-Institute for the Networked Society . Her main research topics are digitalization and democracy as well as internet governance.

The event will be held in English with no translation into German.