BBC religion and digital culture journalist Sophia created the podumentary: The TikTok Election. She has 140k followers over 3M likes on TikTok (and counting), and made headline news in 2020 when she used her knowledge of the platform to show how Donald Trump was using it to campaign for the presidency, even while trying to get the app banned. She was named Edinburgh TV Festival’s Ones to Watch and is one of TikTok’s top 100 creators. She'll talk to us about the rise of journo-influencers, and share insights on how to use TikTok to build relationship and trust, and find news stories.

As director of strategic innovation at the Washington Post, Elite Truong uses emerging technology to help journalists tell stories in new ways, and creates new commercial opportunities that promote sustainable journalism. Before joining the Post, Elite was at VoxMedia for four years and led their off-platform distribution strategy. Join us on Jan 13 to hear Elite share some of the results of her storytelling experiments at the Post.

This year we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cyril Foster Lecture. For the past six decades, scholars and practitioners have delivered the Cyril Foster Lecture on the "elimination of war and the better understanding of the nations of the world”.
For this special anniversary we will be hosting a digital roundtable to reflect upon the past 60 years and how our understanding of international relations has advanced during this time. Moreover, we will tackle what are the core challenges to order and cooperation in the international system in the years to come.

Since 1990, China has used coercion for territorial disputes, foreign arms sales to Taiwan, and foreign leaders’ meetings with the Dalai Lama, despite adverse implications for its international image. China is also curiously selective in the timing, target, and tools of coercion: most cases of Chinese coercion are not military coercion, nor does China coerce all states that pose the same threats to its national security. My book manuscript, Calculating Bully – Explaining Chinese Coercion, examines when, why, and how China coerces states when faced with threats to its national security.