Programme announcement

With the rise of the Gilets Jaunes and Black Lives Matter movements and the furores over police brutality everywhere from France to the US to Belarus, how best do we defend and protect freelance journalists from attack by police, government and the state?

Doing investigative reporting in Italy can be dangerous and complex. Overall, Italian journalism lacks a strong investigative culture comparable to the one of the Anglo-Saxon world and, with some exceptions in broadcasting and other actors, Italian media tend to dedicate little attention to investigative reporting.

How far should a journalist go when it comes to investigating radical Islamism, and what are the dangers? What methods work best - undercover reporting online, the interpretation of documents, social media analysis, documentary or on-the-ground reporting?

Have the convulsions of Covid-19 opened to the door to a creeping censoriousness, surveillance and authoritarianism? Are big tech companies shutting down debate and stoking conspiracy theories by excluding controversial voices, and is the technology for coronavirus surveillance and the social measures to combat it as useful as it seems?

With the resort to facial recognition technology and algorithms by governments and the private sector, big data and the “artificial” intelligence required to process that data are being deployed without any real accountability.

Presentation: Nicholson Baker vs the CIA Nearly a decade ago, while investigating the possibility that the United States had used biological weapons in the Korean War, one of America’s most inventive and challenging novelists Nicholson Baker requested a series of Air Force documents under the provisions of the U.S.

Autumn 2020: The trials of Rui Pinto in Lisbon and Julian Assange in London, at almost exactly the same time and on similar charges, have made even more pressing the question of how to defend the new intermediaries working in and around investigative journalism to challenge power.