Speaker

• 
  Joana Breidenbach

  Moderator

  

  Joana Breidenbach

  Moderator

  Joana has a PhD in cultural anthropology and is the author of numerous books on the cultural effects of globalisation, migration and tourism. Including: Tanz der Kulturen (The Dance of Cultures) (Rowohlt 2000), Maxikulti (Maxiculturalism) (Campus 2008) and Seeing Culture Everywhere (Washington Press 2009). Joana Breidenbach is a cofounder of betterplace.org and the founder of the betterplace lab.

  Twitter: @joanabp | Website: www.betterplace.org

• 
  Julian Breinersdorfer
  

  Julian Breinersdorfer

  After having learned from and worked for Dame Zaha Hadid in London, Julian opened his own architecture practice in Berlin Kreuzberg. He has since been focussing on refurbishing and reprogramming historic building complexes, mostly for tech-industry and start-up clients. His office designed the Factory Berlin, and is currently planning tech campuses in Tehran, Lisbon, Kigali and Berlin. Dealing with densification in urban core areas on a daily basis, Julian started to research the impact of density on human settlement and ecosystems on a global scale with a team of programmers, statisticians and graphic designers. The results of their investigation will be made public in a open source database.

  Website: www.julianbreinersdorfer.com | www.utopolis.org

• 
  Benjamin Weber
  

  Benjamin Weber

  Having worked as a management consultant for 2.5 years, Benjamin paused his job and worked for a large German NGO. For 18 months, he engaged in different departments and projects in Germany and abroad. As a physicist and management consultant in the NGO sector, he came to realize that his different background and mindset enabled him to bring in a unique skillset and perspective that lead to unintended benefits for himself and the organization.

  Having returned to management consulting for now, he lobbies for more colleagues to engage themselves and bring in their abilities in a new (non-profit-) environment.

  Benjamin studied physics in Karlsruhe and now lives in Stuttgart with his wife, from where he explores the world.

• 
  Elisabeth Wehling
  

  Elisabeth Wehling

  Elisabeth Wehling, PhD., is a bestselling author and cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. Using methods from neuroscience, experimental psychology, and discourse analysis, her work tackles a set of simple yet deep questions: How is the mind structured? Where do these structures come from? And how does the way we speak impact our social, economic, and political beliefs? Contrary to common folk theory, human thought is not an abstract, merely fact-driven system. Rather, thought arises from how our bodies interact with the world: Physical experiences with things like motion, emotions, sights, smells, sounds, and tactile perception structure our mind and language and, in turn, influence how we perceive the world.

  Elisabeth’s books include The Little Blue Book (2012) and Your Brain’s Politics (2016) with George Lakoff and the German SPIEGEL-bestseller Politisches Framing (2016). She is co-founder of the journal Moral Cognition and Communication and a leading expert for embodied cognition working with politicians, NGOs, governments, industry, and media institutions across the globe.

  Twitter:  @E_Wehling | Facebook: @elisabethwehling | Website: www.elisabethwehling.com

• 
  Ali Can
  

  Ali Can

  Ali Can is a 23-year-old author, intercultural peacebuilder and founder of the Interkultureller Frieden e.V. (Intercultural Peace Association). Born in the south-east of Turkey, he and his family came to Germany in 1995 to escape the social oppression faced by kurdish Alevis in the Maras Region.

  In 2014 during his teacher training, Ali noticed that as more refugees were arriving an angry and worried discourse was growing ever louder. Convinced that the breeding ground for xenophobia and rightist ideology is partly based on a deep-rooted fear and ignorance of the ‚unknown’, he actively approaches those who are vocally opposed to ‚those’ refugees, ‚those’ Muslims and ‚those’ immigrants. He finds creative ways to facilitate respectful encounters and, where possible, a peaceful conversation between the two parties that breaks down prejudices. These meetings are his answer to racist slogans.

  He recently founded the Hotline für besorgte Bürger (hotline for worried citizens) and with it contacts – amongst others - supporters of the right-wing AfD (Alternative for Germany) party.

  Ali has been nominated twice for the Deutsche Engagementpreis (German Engagement Prize), is the winner of the 2016 Jugenddemokratiepreis (Youth Democracy Prize) and in September last year received two RTL com.mit Awards for his work with refugees.

  He gives readings from his book ‚Hotline für besorgte Bürger’, published by the Lübbe Verlag, throughout the German-speaking world.

  Twitter: @alicanglobal |Website: www.besorgte-buerger.com | Facebook: facebook.com/interkulturellerfrieden/

• 
  Parag Khanna
  

  Parag Khanna

  Parag Khanna is a leading global strategist, world traveler, and best-selling author. He is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He is also the Managing Partner of Hybrid Reality, a boutique geostrategic advisory firm, and Co-Founder & CEO of Factotum, a leading content branding agency.

  Parag's latest book is Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State (2017). He is author of a trilogy of books on the future of world order beginning with The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (2008), followed by How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (2011), and concluding with Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (2016). He is also co-author of Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (2012). In 2008, Parag was named one of Esquire’s “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century,” and featured in WIRED magazine’s “Smart List.” He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, and Bachelors and Masters degrees from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has traveled to more than 100 countries and is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.

  Twitter: @paragkhanna | Website: www.paragkhanna.com | Facebook: facebook.com/DrParagKhanna

• 
  Tom Osborn
  

  Tom Osborn

  Tom is an entrepreneur and community mobilizer. As a teenager, he co-founded GreenChar, an award winning social enterprise that provides affordable and safe energy to households and homes in Kenya. Tom’s experiences growing up in poverty in rural Kenya fuels his passion for social innovation and entrepreneurship. Tom is the youngest recipient of the Echoing Green Fellowship, is a Forbes 30 under 30 Social Entrepreneur and has won Women Deliver Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award and is one of the 100 Most Influential young Kenyans. He currently studies Computer Science and Economics at Harvard University.

  Twitter: @TomLeeOsborn | Website: www.tomleeosborn.com

• 
  Chris Kutarna
  

  Chris Kutarna

  In early 2016, Chris Kutarna stood onstage in front of 500 global business leaders and confidently made two predictions: that Britain would vote to ‘Brexit’ from the European Union and that Donald Trump would be elected President of the United States. Since then, he’s traveled through four continents helping people to smash their old ways of seeing the world and make fresh sense of the time we live in. His first book, *Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance*, is already an international best-seller, and tens of thousands now read his e-letter weekly from www.kutarna.net.

  Chris’ secret for making sense of present-day complexities, he’ll freely admit, is also his greatest weakness: he can’t focus on anything. Chris is a Fellow at the University of Oxford (researching China’s middle class politics); writes for everyone from *Vogue* to *The Guardian*; has started and shut a handful of businesses; and has no idea what he’ll commit to next.

  Twitter: @ChrisKutarna | Website: www.kutarna.net | Facebook: facebook.com/ourageofdiscovery

• 
  Michael Shellenberger
  

  Michael Shellenberger

  Michael Shellenberger is co-founder and Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, where he was president from 2003 to 2015, and a co-author of the Ecomodernist Manifesto.

  Over the last decade, Shellenberger and his colleagues have constructed a new paradigm that views prosperity, cheap energy and nuclear power as the keys to environmental progress. A book he co-wrote (with Ted Nordhaus) in 2007, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, was called by Wired magazine "the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring," while Timemagazine called him a "hero of the environment." In the 1990s, he helped protect the last significant groves of old-growth redwoods still in private hands and bring about labor improvements to Nike factories in Asia.

  Twitter: @ShellenbergerMD | Website: www.environmentalprogress.org

• 
  Hubertus Drinkuth
  

  Hubertus Drinkuth

  Hubertus Drinkuth is Managing Director of Systain Consulting in Hamburg, Germany. With Systain he makes companies understand what sustainability issues truly matter and helps them to overcome their biggest challenges. In today’s globalized world these challenges typically reside in a company’s value chain. Prior to his engagement with Systain, Hubertus strongly focused on building strategies for companies, first as a Consultant with Roland Berger Strategy Consultants in Munich, Tokyo, and Shanghai, later as head of Corporate Strategy with the Otto Group in Hamburg.

  In 2009/10 Hubertus took a year long time-out from the business world and joined the board of the World Future Council Foundation, taking over the responsibility for all business and administrative issues. Today, he still serves on the Supervisory Board of the foundation.

  Twitter: @systainconsult|Website: www.systain.com

• 
  Yascha Mounk
  

  Yascha Mounk

  Yascha Mounk is a Lecturer on Government at Harvard, a Senior Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America and an Executive Director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. A weekly columnist for Slate, a monthly columnist for CNN, a regular contributor to Die Zeit, and the host of The Good Fight podcast, he has recently completed his third book, which argues that liberal democracy is splitting into two new regime forms: illiberal democracy, or democracy without rights, and undemocratic liberalism, or rights without democracy.

  Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk | Website: www.yaschamounk.com | Facebook: facebook.com/yaschamounk/

• 
  Victoria Peter
  

  Victoria Peter

  Victoria has one heart in France and one beating in West Africa, where she develops and promotes citizen engagement and multi-stakeholder collaboration programs. Her firm believe: whatever development means - if anything, it must be based on citizen engagement.

  This is why she passionately develops the regional branch ofMakeSense in West-Africa - a global organisation mobilising citizens, private and public sector to solve social and environmental issues by accelerating grassroots entrepreneurship and social innovation.

  Apart from creativity workshops and many post-its, Victoria also accompanies African entrepreneurs and big organisations in France and Africa seeking to develop solutions for sustainable food systems. She defends the cause of citizen engagement and impactful entrepreneurship at various conferences in and around the African continent.

  Victoria has been working with citizens, entrepreneurs and big organisations since the age of 20. After developing a social enterprise foundation in Amsterdam at the age of 19 and building an innovation network for the fight against food waste in her early 20ies, she also placed open innovation and entrepreneurship within big companies, such as the Deutsche Bahn.

  Victoria holds a Masters Degree in International Development and Africa from Sciences Po, Paris

  Twitter: @VicyPeter / @MakeSense | Website: www.africa.makesense.org