As part of the lecture series Was zu tun ist. Demokratie geht jetzt erst los! Naika Foroutan will speak about the strategic demoralisation of societies by the extreme right on 07 November 2018. The speaker's concrete proposals for action will be presented and discussed.

The debate on migration is currently taking up a lot of space in the public debate. According to Naika Foroutan, a clear shift from a basic moral consensus to a devaluation of human lives can be seen, especially in the discussion about sea rescue and human camps in North Africa. This is a result of the strategic demoralisation of societies by the extreme right. In order to counter the regression of the migration discourse with racist images and to set up a different vision of the future than that of the right-wing forces, Naika Foroutan pleads for the following steps of action, which we will discuss in the event:

• making civil society visible, which is committed to open coexistence
• forging post-migrant alliances to address structural issues
• reclaiming the sovereignty of interpretation and setting new accents to counter cultural pessimism and the wave of hatred with the vision of a plural democracy
• have the courage to build a new peace movement
• work towards a broader understanding of integration
• redefining what it means to be German

Naika Foroutan is professor for "Integrationsforschung und Gesellschaftspolitik" at the HU Berlin and director of the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research. Her areas of focus include migration and integration, images of Islam and Muslims in Germany, and the social transformation of countries of immigration. Since 2011, she has also been the head of the research group Junge Islambezogene Themen in Deutschland (JUNITED) as part of the Junge Islam Konferenz (JIK) project. She has received several awards for her research and commitment, such as the Berlin Integration Award following her intervention in the controversial "Sarrazindebatte" that took place throughout Germany.

Further information on the event can be found here.