Aronson Center for International Studies Speaker Series: Heidi Tworek, Peter Pomerantsev, and Leticia Bode

Description

The Fall 2021 Aronson Center for International Studies Speaker Series concludes with "The Rise of Cross-National Conspiracy Theories" with Heidi Tworek, Peter Pomerantsev, and Leticia Bode.

Please attend the event by using the Zoom link.

Heidi Tworek is associate professor of international history and public policy at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. Her work examines the history and policy around media, hate speech, health communications, international organizations, and platform governance. She is a member of the Science and Technology Studies program, the Language Science Initiative, and the Institute for European Studies at UBC. She is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation as well as a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

Peter Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University where he co-directs the Arena Initiative. Between 2017 and 2020, he was a senior fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he was the director of the Arena Initiative, a research project dedicated to overcoming the challenges of digital era disinformation and polarization. His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House, and Gordon Burns prizes. It is translated into over a dozen languages and was dramatized on BBC Radio 4. His new book, This is Not Propaganda, was released in August 2019 and has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burns Prize and was a Times Book of the Year. Pomerantsev has testified on the challenges of information war and media development to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and UK Parliament Defense Select Committee. He was a specialist advisor on the UK Parliamentary Committee on Fake News, and was a member of USC Annenberg's Transatlantic Working Group on Internet Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression. He is a columnist at The American Interest and writes for publications including the New York Times, Granta, and The Atlantic.

Leticia Bode is an associate professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology master's program at Georgetown University. She researches the intersection of communication, technology, attitudes, and behavior, emphasizing the role communication and information technologies may play in the acquisition, use, effects, and implications of both information and misinformation. She earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin.