Welcome to the "Democratic Citizenship in Post-Truth Societies" Connected Community, where we illuminate the path forward through the haze of misinformation and shifting narratives. At the heart of our endeavor is the fusion of education and research, drawing insightful blueprints for rebuilding trust in public institutions amidst the challenges of post-truth phenomena. With expertise spanning social philosophy, civic culture, and digital communication, our internationally collaborative approach brings together scholars, students, and stakeholders across diverse fields. We host engaging activities such as virtual workshops, dynamic conferences, and educational seminars, all designed to foster interdisciplinary innovation and discourse. By leveraging technology and spearheading collaborations with the private sector and civil society, we ensure inclusive, impactful knowledge transfer, empowering future leaders to actively engage in democratic processes. Join us as we bridge academic depth and societal relevance, creating a vibrant ecosystem where informed citizenship thrives.
Current-day societies are facing a general crisis of truth and trust in public institutions such as schools, governments, and, most extremely, science. With the rise of artificial intelligence, disinformation networks, fragmentation and polarization, epistemic chambers, filter bubbles, and a general state of disbelief regarding truth, citizenship itself is going through considerable social transformations.
Consequently, the activities and research conducted during this project will focus on identifying the fundamental problems of current-day post-truth societies and establishing some clear lines toward possible solutions as they pertain to the decaying trust in public institutions and the general crisis of truth in contemporary societies. We aim to collaborate and build partnerships with key stakeholders, including universities, the private sector, and various academic departments, to foster interdisciplinarity.
Collaborations with the private sector will allow for a wider dissemination of the research findings. The private sector can provide valuable insights into how businesses tackle the issues posed by post-truth society in their everyday operations. Additionally, we seek to engage with civil society to facilitate comprehensive investigations into these issues.
To tackle such a problem, partnerships both within the university and outside it will be established so as to reach a numerous audience with the topics of interest for this project. Since citizenship and its relation to post-truth offer a large range of possible social actors for direct or indirect involvement, civil society (NGO’s) will be an important stakeholder for the dissemination of our research findings and for our activities. Romanian civil society is already working on dismantling some of its negative effects through immediate and concrete interventions and action through workshops, educational materials, posters, promotionals, and online communication, among other types of action.
A collaboration between academia, civil society, and the private sector will facilitate a concrete transfer of knowledge from researchers to businesses and fieldworkers (NGOs), and allow for a broader coalition for tackling the negative social effects brought by post-truth society.
OBJECTIVES
Our main purpose is to facilitate opportunities for people of all academic levels. To achieve this, we will provide various opportunities, including but not limited to conferences on related themes concerning the post-truth world, educational workshops, research meetings, peer reviews, and assistance with ongoing papers or research projects. The main goal is to encapsulate as many activities as possible in order to create an actual community of people that can help each other, but not only that, also people who try to inform the general public and promote the latest discoveries and research in social studies.
ACTIVITIES
1. RBL Workshop (1st year of activity)
Objective: Introduce students to research methodologies and critical discussions on the post-truth world, demagogy, and populism. Implicate professors and PhD students in diverse types of activities.
At the beginning of the academic year, we will conduct an intensive workshop in which students will collaborate in interdisciplinary teams to formulate research issues, devise methodology, and participate in contemporary debates.
2. Annual check-in Workshop
Objective: Consult with all individuals involved in the present project regarding the effectiveness and shortcomings of the existing plan.
Before entering into a brand-new event, we will analyze all active participants and universities, provide training on pertinent concerns, and evaluate the effectiveness of present strategies. This event also serves as an opportunity for us to convene and engage in talks regarding academia, research, casual dialogues, and formal debates.
3. Conference on the topic of Post-Truth
Objective: Motivate students to disseminate their studies to a wider audience.
In the conclusion of the school year, students will exhibit their work in a specialized conference, which will include paper presentations, panel discussions, and networking opportunities.
4. Educational Seminars and Peer Reviews
Objective: Support student research through critical discussion and constant feedback.
Monthly seminars offer structured opportunities for peer review and research development. These meetings should facilitate constant communication between all parties involved.
5. Teaching activities
Objective: Introduce students into the theories and practices of civic culture and social education by interactive courses
The course Civic Culture and Social Education (BA level) hold in the second semester of each academic year by Prof. Ciprian Mihali at UBB will be open in hybrid format to guest teachers involved in the project and to international students. The course provides 4 ECTS.
EVENTS
Truth and post-truth
Cluj Philosophy Festival, second edition, October 9-12, 2025
A ghost has been haunting the world for over a decade now: the ghost of post-truth.
In a spectral and omnipresent apparition, post-truth is intended to be the new rival of truth. A rival that does not challenge the truth, but presents itself as modern, agile and therefore superior.
This year's Philosophy Festival brings together professors, researchers, students, artists, writers, to propose to a larger public a debate about the unequal competition between truth and post-truth. Emerging out of defiance of truth, in spaces and from people for whom truth can be a danger, post-truth is the harbinger of a new world, freed from the effort of knowledge. A world in which the blindest and most vehement beliefs can defeat the patient search for evidence, can eliminate hypotheses and their falsifiability, can rally masses of people around counter-factual scenarios, so-called alternative sciences, can challenge scientific progress and conquests accumulated over centuries.
Aggressive political strategies have found a fearsome ally in technological devices and social networks. Together they reinvent reality and force it to submit to the most dangerous fantasies that insist on becoming reality themselves.
The frameworks of our thinking have shifted with a speed we still do not fully understand. In less than two decades, the spider’s web of the internet has enveloped us with such effectiveness that we can no longer imagine the world without it or without its social networks. It is now evident that algorithms change not only the way we make our choices, but also the way we form our opinions and judgments. Post-truth today bears witness to a state of affairs that, until recently, we thought impossible: it may be that all of us are driven not by the tireless pursuit of truth, but by the quickest possible finding of those comforting certainties and of those welcoming communities in which our certainties are shared, acknowledged, and circulated, without any necessary connection to reality. And it may be that truth itself has changed its meaning, its mode of appearance and manifestation, its social function, to become a weapon in the hands of those who struggle to the death in the digital world.
Whatever we may choose to call it, and however consistent we may consider it from an epistemological point of view, post-truth has changed the dynamics of our societies, redefined politics, and altered the balance of power on a global scale. t has created new forms of spirituality, shaken science out of its uncontested supremacy, and set philosophy ablaze.
This gives rise to several challenges, which the participants of the Philosophy Festival will question: Are the classical definitions of truth still valid today? Is post-truth a weakening of truth or is it just the digitalized version of the old lies, falsification and manipulation? How can we break out of the echo chambers that our belief in alternative truths locks us into? Could there be a kind of revenge of reality, allowing truth to recover its fundamental value for our existence? And how, today, is the relationship between science and faith, science and politics, science and philosophy being rewritten?
Ciprian Mihali Professor at the Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca in Romania, Ciprian Mihali obtained the title of Doctor of Philosophy at the Universities of Strasbourg and Cluj, with a thesis on the hermeneutics of everyday life. With concerns in political and social philosophy, he is the author of seven individual books on contemporary philosophy and two others written in collaboration with the architect Augustin Ioan. He has also directed the publication of several collective works on issues related to the public space and territories of the post-communist world. He translated thirty books of contemporary French thought. A visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Lyon, and Lille, he has also given courses in several French universities.
In 2012, he received the Palmes Académiques in recognition of his merits in the promotion of French culture. From 2012 to 2016, he served as Romania's ambassador to Senegal and other West African countries. Between 2016 and 2020, he was the regional director for Western Europe of the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie in Brussels.
He has resumed in 2020 the courses in social and contemporary philosophy at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj. He is currently the Director of the Department of Philosophy at UBB and supervises doctoral theses.
Diana Miheș
Diana Miheș is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, where she also serves as an associate lecturer. Her research explores contemporary philosophy, identity, minority issues, and work ethics within the technological context. Since 2025, she has been an editor and translator at IDEA Publishing House. Actively engaged in civic and educational initiatives, Diana coordinates volunteer projects, facilitates philosophy workshops for children, and collaborates with NGOs focused on social inclusion and civic education. She has organized ecofeminism workshops, participated in educational marathons and summer schools, and presented her work at national and international conferences, with publications in international academic journals.
Bogdan-Andrei Lungu
bl Bogdan-Andrei Lungu is a Ph.D. Student in social science at the Faculty of Political, Administrative and Communication Science from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. His research projects focus on the effects of novel technologies on societies, democracies, and their political institutions from an interdisciplinary lens (sociology, philosophy, psychology, etc.). Moreover, his research and theoretical interests also encompass the effects of artificial intelligence and machine-learning-driven technologies on social identity formation, discrimination, exploitation, and related issues. Besides academic work, Bogdan conducts frequent independent-led research projects, article-writing, and advocacy campaigns on digital rights - human rights on the internet - both at the national level and at the international level through European Digital Rights (EDRi) where he has published articles on the effects of social networking sites on the socio-political tumults of the electoral period in Romania.
Octavian-Ionuț Ojog
oo Octavian-Ionuț Ojog is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, under the supervision of Professor Ciprian Mihali. With a background in Psychology (BA and MA), his academic trajectory reflects an interdisciplinary orientation, focusing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, German Idealism, and contemporary political theory. His current research explores the thought of authors such as Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Ernesto Laclau, within the broader framework of the Lacanian Left. He is the co-founder of Pe Lângă Subiect (PLS), a media project launched in 2023, which serves as a multi-platform space (YouTube, Spotify, TikTok) for critical analysis and theoretical debate on contemporary socio-political and cultural issues. The podcasts and articles produced through this initiative have gained increasing attention and frequently spark public discussion in the online sphere.
Ancuța-Ioana Sabou
as Ancuța-Ioana Sabou is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Babeș-Bolyai University from Cluj-Napoca, working under the supervision of Professor Ciprian Mihali. She completed both her undergraduate and master's degrees at the same Faculty of Philosophy, pursuing a consistent academic trajectory with a focus on contemporary French thought. Her current doctoral research explores the redefinition of the concept of the common within the contemporary socio-political landscape. At this stage of her work, she draws primarily on the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy, Achille Mbembe, and Bruno Latour.
UPF Barcelona
Camil Ungureanu - local lead
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U Ljubljana
Gregor Moder - local lead
gm Gregor Moder is a philosopher working as a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. His works include Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (Northwestern UP 2017), Antigone. An Essay on Hegel’s Political Philosophy(Turia+Kant 2025, in German) and several edited volumes, The Object of Comedy (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), The Ethics of Ernst Lubitsch(Rowman&Littlefield 2024) and The Resilience of History: The Yugoslav Wars Through Art(Maska 2024).
Dan Nădășan
Dan Nadasan Dan Nădășan is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, under the supervision of Gregor Moder. He previously completed a BA in Politics and International Studies and a MA in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His current research focuses on the use of the notion of ‘appearance’ (Erscheinung) in Hegel’s reading of Kant, with an emphasis on the centrality of this notion for the ‘Hegelo-Lacanian’ synthesis of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. He is also interested in philosophical and psychoanalytical theories of Artificial Intelligence and the internet, having previously completed a dissertation on cyborg subjectivity and digital markets. He was a guest editor for the ‘Kant 300’ issue of the Problemi International Journal and is a co-founder of the Romanian podcast “Pe lângă Subiect.”
Lea Kuhar
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U Edinburgh
Mihaela Mihai - local lead
mm Mihaela Mihai is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh. She works within the tradition of critical theory and has published on the politics of memory, political emotions, political judgment and social epistemology. She is the author of Negative Emotions and Transitional Justice(Columbia University Press, 2016) and Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care. The Art of Complicity and Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2022) and of several edited volumes on political violence and democratic theory.
Diana Miheș is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, where she also serves as an associate lecturer. Her research explores contemporary philosophy, identity, minority issues, and work ethics within the technological context. Since 2025, she has been an editor and translator at IDEA Publishing House. Actively engaged in civic and educational initiatives, Diana coordinates volunteer projects, facilitates philosophy workshops for children, and collaborates with NGOs focused on social inclusion and civic education. She has organized ecofeminism workshops, participated in educational marathons and summer schools, and presented her work at national and international conferences, with publications in international academic journals.
