Join the Wende Museum, the Thomas Mann House, and dublab radio for the seventh program in this series on the current state of democracies. How should a democracy deal with its own vulnerabilities? How do democracies need to evolve to deal successfully with increasing global levels of ecological crisis, geopolitical tensions, economic disparities, and culture wars? How much vulnerability can a democracy endure?

The Student Council consists of a team of highly engaged, talented, and diverse undergraduate and graduate students who invite prominent guest speakers to discuss topics relating to society, politics, culture, and art. In conversation with academics, journalists, politicians, and artists, the students will explore the various threats to democratic institutions and principles worldwide, as well as strategies to potentially overcome these threats.

In a special in-person episode this summer, the student council interviews “Radical Daughters” at the Thomas Mann House on July 18. Since 2019, “Radical Daughters,” a group of performance artists and educators from Germany, have been inspiring effective, extraordinary forms of political participation through their interactive workshops. Their training plan of action, art, and politics is designed to ignite the spark – to show how easy it can be to take action.

Cesy Leonard is an action artist, speaker, and founder of the “Radikale Töchter” – inspiring people through political art to act and stand up for democracy, freedom, equality, brotherhood, and sisterhood. She studied acting in Berlin and worked in film, television, and theater. Often experiencing what it meant to have to conform to a clichéd image of a woman led her to start directing her own films. Her 2012 film “Guilt – The Barbarism of Europe” awarded her various prizes, such as the Web Video Award. In 2012, she joined the artistic staff of the collective “Center for Political Beauty,” which promotes pressing political issues through their art. Seeing how art, in particular, has the power to mobilize people to act is the inspiration behind the “Radikale Töchter.” Funded by the “Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung” as a model project, the team works to strengthen democracy in the former GDR.

Josephin Haardt studied International Relations and Economics in Erfurt. She has been working as a project manager and managing director of the “Radical Daughters” since April 2019. This is where her interests in democracy, sisterhood, and organizational talent come together.