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SUMMARY:Dealing with Extremism - Professor David Runciman\, University of 
 Cambridge
DTSTART:20170203T173000Z
DTEND:20170203T183000Z
UID:TALK67302@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Janet Gibson
DESCRIPTION:Many extremist ideologies rely heavily on conspiracy theories 
 to explain how the world works and where power lies.   This lecture explor
 es what our understanding of conspiracy theories – where they come from\
 , how they work\, who believes in them – can tell us about dealing with 
 extremism.  The US presidential election campaign showed that conspiracy t
 heories are increasingly becoming part of the currency of democratic polit
 ics.  Is democracy itself becoming more extremist?  Where do the boundarie
 s lie between the contestation of democratic values and the repudiation of
  them?  This lecture will examine the relationship between harmless conspi
 racy theories\, dangerous extremism and the rise of ‘post-truth’ polit
 ics and it will ask how we can still draw the line between them.\n\nBiogra
 phy\n\nDavid Runciman is Professor of Politics and Head of the Department 
 of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at Cambridge University.  Hi
 s books include Political Hypocrisy and The Confidence Trap: A History of 
 Democracy in Crisis and he writes regularly about politics for the London 
 Review of Books.  He is one of the directors of a major Leverhulme-funded 
 research project based in Cambridge on Conspiracy and Democracy\, which ex
 plores the history and impact of conspiracy theories on democratic politic
 s. (More details of the project can be found here: http://www.conspiracyan
 ddemocracy.org/) He is the host of the popular weekly podcast Talking Poli
 tics. 
LOCATION:LMH\, Lady Mitchell Hall
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