Social Media and Democracy will feature a panel of two Kent State University professors and two Pulitzer Center Journalists to discuss how social media platforms are influencing policy and giving a voice to the silenced on Tuesday, Nov. 19, 7:30-9 p.m. in the First Energy Auditorium, 340 Franklin Hall.
Social Media and Democracy is a joint program sponsored by the Gerald H. Read Center for International and Intercultural Education, the Political Science Department and the School of Communication Studies at Kent State. Guest speakers will include Director of the School of Communication Studies Paul Haridakis, Ph.D., on Social Media in an Established Democracy; Professor of Political Science Steven W. Hook, Ph.D., on Tweeting Foreign Policy: Social Media at the U.S. State Department; Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting journalists Yochi Dreazen on Social Media and Terrorism and Jenna Krajeski (tentatively) on Social Media and Citizen Empowerment. Pulitzer Center Social Media Editor Caroline D'Angelo will facilitate the panel.
Following the panel presentation, join international student representatives from China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, Brazil, Iran and Egypt for light refreshments and discussion circles.
Speaker Biographies:
Caroline D'Angelo, the Pulitzer Center's social media editor, came to the Pulitzer Center from the University of Pennsylvania where she was the communications coordinator and staff writer for the Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership at Wharton. D'Angelo has a master's degree in environmental studies, focusing on international environmental policy and communications. She is co-founder of wH2O: The Journal of Gender & Water, the first journal on global water and women's issues, for which she serves as editor-in-chief.
Yochi Dreazen is a senior writer for Foreign Policy, covering national security and foreign affairs. He is also writer-in-residence at the Center for a New American Security, where he is working on a book about military suicide that will be published by Random House's Crown division early next year. Dreazen has served as a contributing editor at The Atlantic and the senior national security correspondent for National Journal, and spent 11 years at The Wall Street Journal, most recently as its military correspondent. Dreazen has reported from more than 20 countries and spent a total of nearly four years on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Among Dreazen's most recent reporting with the Pulitzer Center is a focus on Mali. The group known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has imposed harsh Islamic law in portions of the country, and, as Dreazen writes, is "working to turn northern Mali into the next Afghanistan." Another recent Pulitzer Center project focuses on the use of drones in Israel and Hezbollah. Dreazen's reporting has taken him to a host of other countries where he has kept a sustained focus on national security and military affairs.
Jenna Krajeski is a journalist based in Istanbul. From March 2010 to June 2011 she lived in Cairo, Egypt where she was an editor and reporter for the English language version of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm (later Egypt Independent). For the past two years she has focused on the Kurdish minorities in Turkey and Iraq. Her work has appeared online and in print in The New Yorker, Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic and elsewhere.
For the Pulitzer Center, Krajeski has focused on Kurdistan and Turkey. Her project page for "Turkey Under Protest," notes that the protests revealed deep problems from police brutality and authoritarianism to a fractured opposition moved from the margin to the spotlight.
Paul Haridakis, Ph.D., is a professor in and director of the School of Communication Studies at Kent State. Haridakis, who is also a lawyer, conducts research on media uses and effects, law, public policy, new communication technologies, sports communication, freedom of speech, and the history of communication studies. His recent work has focused on the role of YouTube and other social media in political campaigns and interpersonal communication, user-generated content, mediated interactivity, and First Amendment issues related to the regulation of content in various media such as the Internet and television.
Steven W. Hook, Ph.D., is professor and past chair of the Political Science Department at Kent State University. He is the author of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Paradox of World Power (4th ed., 2014) and National Interest and Foreign Aid (1995). He is a co-author, with John Spanier, of American Foreign Policy since World War II (19th ed., 2013); and editor of Democratic Peace in Theory and Practice (2010), Comparative Foreign Policy: Adaptation Strategies of the Great and Emerging Powers (2002) and Foreign Aid Toward the Millennium (1996). His articles have appeared in such journals as World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Asian Survey, European Security, International Interactions, and Foreign Policy Analysis. Hook is a past president of the Foreign Policy Analysis sections of the International Studies Association and the American Political Science Association. He is the recipient of the university's 2008 Distinguished Teaching Award.