In October 2025, I was honored to be one of the keynote speakers for a conference marking the 20th anniversary of the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) of the University of Bremen.
The conference, titled “20 Years into the Future: What is our vision of media, data, and society?“, featured excellent contributions by scholars from different disciplines, backgrounds, and parts of the world, as well as keynote speeches by José van Dijck, Nick Couldry, Alenda Y. Chang, and myself.
In my keynote speech, titled “Visions of political participation in the digital age“, I took the opportunity of ZeMKI’s twentieth anniversary to reflect on how changes in communication environments have reshaped how citizens participate in politics and how that participation is imagined and constructed in everyday discourse and behaviors.
You can watch my keynote speech below. Videos of the other keynotes and important moments of the conference are available on ZeMKI’s YouTube channel.
Cristian Vaccari 