Julia Schulze Wessel is a private lecturer at the TU Dresden (technical university) and managing director of anDemos - Institute for Applied Democracy and Social Research e.V. in Dresden (www.andemos.eu), which she founded together with colleagues in 2019. anDemos conceives a form of science communication that is geared towards bringing together different bodies of knowledge and different experiential knowledge. This method of 'outreach science' is application-oriented and geared towards close cooperation with practice partners. At present, anDemos is active in the federal states of Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia. With long-term projects and various series of events, anDemos aims to build sustainable structures of science-based political education in different federal states.

Julia Schulze Wessel studied social sciences at the Carl-von-Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. As a research assistant, she built up the Hannah Arendt Archive and subsequently completed her doctorate on the political theory of anti-Semitism in Hannah Arendt's work at the TU Dresden in 2006. In 2014, she habilitated with a thesis on the political theory of the refugee. She was the founder of the research network for research on integration, xenophobia and right-wing extremism in Saxony and led several research projects, including "Wege der Demokratie. Group discussions with Syrian refugees about experiences of dictatorship, democracy and arrival" (together with Prof. Frank Asbrock, TU Chemnitz).

Until 2019, she held substitute professorships (political theory) at the universities of Leipzig and Dresden. Her research and teaching focuses on the theory of democracy, the limits of democracy, participation, citizenship, flight and migration.