May 27-28, 2027
Maastricht, Netherlands
Deadline: October 27, 2026
Every new media technology has offered both promise and peril to truth in democracy. Evolving media can spread both truth and untruth at new speeds and scales — mediated (un)truths can be a force for democratisation and de-democratisation. Today we debate the impact of AI and social media; yesterday we debated the impact of the mass press, radio, television, and early internet.
This workshop asks how democratic politicians have perceived, promoted, and protected truth across the media revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We focus on how innovations in print, audio-visual, and early digital media repeatedly forced politicians to reconceive and renegotiate the meaning of truth in democracy. We also discuss how they devised countermeasures against falsehoods, and whether those measures were (counter)productive.
Research questions: presentations address any of these three guiding questions:
- How did new communication media (re)shape politicians’ perceptions of truth, and of the role of truth in democracy?
- Which policy measures (media regulations etc.) did politicians take to promote and protect truth in democracy?
- What were the intended and unintended (possibly counterproductive) effects of these policy measures, and how were these measures (re)evaluated, adjusted or abandoned?
Scholars from any discipline and case studies from anywhere are welcome, but presentations must focus on politics and media and be historical — concerning pre-twenty-first-century media revolutions.
Slow science format: no parallel panels, each participant gets a full hour, and the whole workshop is one continuous conversation over two days. Around ten presentations. Focus on work in progress: (partially) written papers optional. A joint publication may be explored afterwards.
Included: no registration fee · coffee, lunches, and the Thursday conference dinner
Travel: international rail via Liège, Aachen · air connections via Amsterdam, Brussels, Düsseldorf, Eindhoven
Abstract (300 words) + short bio (100 words) by 27 October 2026
betto.vanwaarden@maastrichtuniversity.nl
Notification by 13 November 2026
Convened by Betto van Waarden, Assistant Professor of History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University
Funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) · Supported by the sector plan programme Disinformation & Democracy
