Radical Agreement in Politics | Paula Berman, Jennifer Morone, and Mark Reiff in Conversation With Leon Erichsen

In 2020, ideological conflicts reached a fever pitch, and the media landscape has become extraordinarily disorienting. Are we simply heading into a more fragmented era? This panel aims to find the light at the end of the tunnel, discussing all kinds of approaches to discover common ground for a more nuanced and vital politics. 

SPEAKERS 

Paula Berman is a researcher and builder at the intersection of technology and democracy. She is a founding member of Democracy Earth Foundation, a non-profit organization backed by Y Combinator and Templeton World Charity Foundation, building open-source censorship-resistant digital democracies. 

Jennifer Lyn Morone is the RadicalxChange Foundation CEO and a multidisciplinary visual artist, activist, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the human experience about technology, economics, politics, and identity, and the moral and ethical issues that arise from such systems. Her interests lie in exploring ways of creating social justice and equal distribution of the future. Morone is a trained sculptor with BFA from SUNY Purchase and earned her MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London with Dunne and Raby. Her work has been presented at institutions, festivals, museums, and galleries around the world, including ZKM, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Ars Electronica, HEK, the Martin Gropius Bau, the Science Gallery, Transmediale, SMBA, Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, panke.gallery, Aksioma, Drugo more, and featured extensively on international media outlets such as The Economist, WIRED, WMMNA, Vice, the Guardian, BBC World News, Tagesspiegel, Netzpolitik, the Observer. 

Mark R. Reiff is the author of five books, including In the Name of Liberty: The Argument for Universal Unionization (Cambridge University Press, 2020); On Unemployment, Volume I and II (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Exploitation and Economic Justice in the Liberal Capitalist State (Oxford University Press, 2013). He has taught political, legal, and moral philosophy at the University of Manchester, the University of Durham, the University of California at Davis, Sonoma State University, and the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Before returning to academia in 1998, he was a practicing lawyer, representing clients in commercial litigation matters for many years. In 2008-09 he was a Faculty Fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. His current book project is called The Unbearable Resilience of Illiberalism. Abstracts of all his work, plus excerpts from his books, samples of his papers, and more, are available on his website: www.markreiff.org. 

MODERATOR 

Leon Erichsen is an entrepreneurship and technology evangelist at RadicalxChange Foundation, a nonprofit organization building next-generation political economies. Previously, he has worked as a venture analyst for the Blockchain Labs of Accelerator Frankfurt, a crypto-focused go-to-market program for early-stage startups. He graduated with the Class of 2020 in Management, Philosophy & Economics (B.Sc.) at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, where he directed the student initiatives FS Blockchain and FS Model United Nations.