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Ayreen Anastas (PS/US)
Ayreen Anastas is an artist born in occupied Palestine and lives in New York.
Miriyam Aouragh (NL)
Miriyam Aouragh is a scholar and activist in antiracism and anti-imperialism movements. She follows, and writes about, the complex revolutionary dynamics in the Arab world with special interest in the impact of the internet. Her research interests and areas of expertise include: digital imperialism, cyber warfare; social media; activism; Arab uprisings; and MENA (Palestine/Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, Bahrain, Egypt). Miriyam grew up in Amsterdam as a second generation Moroccan and has a background in cultural anthropology/non-Western sociology (Vrije Universiteit Amsterrdam). For her PhD she studied the implications of the internet (Web 1.0) in Palestine after the outbreak of the Second Intifada. In her postdoc research at the Oxford Internet Institute she focused on the political role of Web 2.0 for grassroots activists. She is currently Leverhulme fellow at Communication And Media Research Institute at Westminster University.
Her work is published in several books and journals including her own monograph Palestine Online: Transnationalism, the Internet and the construction of Identity (London, I.B. Tauris 2011). Her next book is about cyber imperialism which will offer an attempt to theorize how the contradictions of capitalism shape the modes and meanings of resistance in the era of revolution and digital transformations. (Source: http://www.westminster.ac.uk)
» www.miriyamaouragh.blogspot.be
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Franco Berardi (IT)
Franco Berardi is a contemporary writer, media-theorist and media-activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978). Like others Involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970′s, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. During the 1980′s he contributed to the magazines Semiotexte (New York), Chimerees (Paris), Metropoli (Rome) and Musica 80 (Milan). In the 1990′s he published Mutazione e Ciberpunk (Genoa, 1993), Cibernauti (Rome, 1994), and Felix (Rome, 2001). He is currently collaborating on the magazine Derive Approdi as well as teaching social history of communication at the Accademia di belle Arti in Milan. He is the co-founder of the e-zine rekombinant.org and the telestreet phenomenon.
Key Publications: The Uprising. On Poetry and Finance (2013); The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (2009); Ethereal Shadows: Communications and Power in Contemporary Italy (with Marco Jacquement & Gianfranco Vitali, 2009); Precarious Rhapsody. Semio-capitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (2009); Félix Guattari. Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (2008).
Heath Bunting (UK)
Heath Bunting works with technological, cultural, and social systems. He has explored both the dirty and progressive dimensions of the Internet, hacked urban spaces through physical activities, and in recent years has been dedicated to an extensive research aimed at constructing fully valid identities from scratch based on a deep knowledge of how such identities are officially constructed. Heath Bunting is a founding member of the web collective irational. In 1997 he publicly declared his retirement from net art, but his work nevertheless still involves online and computational aspects, only more integrated with the conceptual and material possibilities offered by life in the offline world.
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Damien Cahill (AUS)
Damien Cahill’s research focuses primarily on the relationship between the economy and society. This informs his writing on neoliberal think tanks, neoliberalism and the global financial crisis; neoliberal hegemony; and the social foundations of the contemporary Australian economy. Damien is Chair of the Department of Political Economy at the Faculty of Arts and Social Science, University of Sydney. His work has appeared in publications including Arena, Australian Journal of Political Science, Journal of Australian Political Economy, Labour History, Overland, Rethinking Marxism and Z-Magazine. He has also contributed several book chapters to edited collections.
Key Publications: Market Society: History, Theory, Practice (ed., with Benjamin Spies-Butcher, Joy Paton, 2012); Neoliberalism: Beyond the Free Market (ed., with Lindy Edwards, Frank Stilwell, 2012); Always embedded neoliberalism and the global financial crisis, In Kate Macdonald, Shelley Marshall, Sanjay Pinto (eds.), New Visions for Market Governance: Crisis and Renewal (2012)
» www.sydney.edu.au/arts/political_economy/staff/profiles/damien.cahill
Mauricio Corbalán (AR)
Mauricio Corbalán is an architect and urbanist living and working in Buenos Aires. He is a co-founder of m7red. Based in Buenos Aires, m7red is an urban resources network with archives, laboratories and consulting offices. m7red was founded by Mauricio Corbalan and Pio Torroja in 2005. Since then, they have been working with a wide range of experts and non-experts, analysing, discussing, researching and making proposals on the most pressing political and urban topics. m7red is working on the boundaries between an NGO, a research group, urban consulting and a strategic forum. Its know-how comes from the analysis and management of exchange processes and transformations between civil society and the nation state’s control. Mauricio Corbalán is also part of the Blue House project at IJburg, developed by Jeanne van Heeswijk, Herve Paraponaris and Dennis Kaspori , since its inception in 2005.
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Valentina Desideri (NL)
Valentina Desideri considers making as a form of study, and study as a form of making. She wants to create the condition to rehearse another kind of subjectivity: a being who creates herself through a social ensemble that is itself a constant and provisional creation. Her current practices include Fake Therapy and Political Therapy.
She co-organizes the Performing Arts Forum in St. Erme, France (www.pa-f.net), she speculates with Prof. Stefano Harney, she writes biographies by reading people’s palms, she dances, and she is often around.
Valentina Desideri trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London and did a MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.
» www. faketherapy.wordpress.com
Michael Dillon (UK)
Michael Dillon is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Lancaster University, UK. He researches the problematisation of politics, security and war from the perspective of continental philosophy. He has been especially interested in what happens to the problematisation of security when security discourses and technologies take life rather than sovereign territoriality as their referent object. He publishes widely in international relations as well as in cultural and political theory. Among his recent book publications are: Foucault on Politics, Security and War (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008, co-editor Andrew Neal), The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (Routledge, 2009, co-author Julian Reid); and, Deconstructing International Politics (Routledge 2012). Forthcoming is, Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century: A Political Analytic of Finitude (Routledge). His latest essays include: ‘Specters of Biopolitics: Eschatology, Katechon and Resistance,’ The South Atlantic Quarterly, Summer 2011; ‘Afterlife: Living Death to Political Spirituality,’ Millennium Journal of International Studies, 2013; and, ‘Segurança e modernidade: a infinitude da governance finita, (Security and Modernity: The Infinite Government of Finite Things)’ in Nildo Avelino and Salvo Vaccaro, eds. Governamentalidade Segurança, Sao Paulo, Brazil: Editora Intermeios, 2013. Michael Dillon also co-edits The Journal of Cultural Research (Routledge).
» www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/ppr/profiles/michael-dillon
Katja Dreyer
Katja Dreyer was born in Berlin in 1974. She studied at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Utrecht where she graduated as a performer and theatre maker in 1999. Since 2000 she has been working in Belgium and elsewhere as a maker and co-creator or as a performer in the field of dance, theatre and performance. She worked with and for Ivana Mueller, Bernard Van Eeghem, Miet Warlop, Superamas, Stefan Dreher, Mette Edwardsen, Sanja Mitrovic, Bill Aitchison et al. In her solo work she is inspired by historical events.
Between 28 and 30 July 2014 Katja Dreyer will perform the German version of Lecture for Every One by Sarah Vanhee.
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Wolfgang Fiel (AUT)
Besides his collaborative practice with tat ort Wolfgang Fiel is working individually, in various capacities and institutional settings as an independent artist, architect, curator, researcher, educator, and writer. He is currently teaching at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, is a member of the Advisory Board of the Arts and Culture Division in the Federal Chancellery of Austria and an Editorial Advisor of the Design Ecologies journal published by Intellect, UK. After having finished his studies of architecture in Vienna and London, he received his PhD with A practice led investigation into emergent paradigms of immediate political action from the Planetary Collegium at the University of Plymouth/UK in 2012. He has published a number of articles and books, such as a monograph on the work of Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz titled Metalanguage of Space with Springer in 2012.
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Rene Gabri (IR/US)
Rene Gabri is an artist born in Iran and lives in New York.
Susan George (AR)
Susan George is an internationally renowned political scientist and the author of 16 books written in French and English and widely translated. She is president of the Board of the Transnational Institute TNI in Amsterdam, a decentralised fellowship of scholars living throughout the world whose work is intended to contribute to social justice and who are active in civil society in their own countries. She is Honorary President of ATTAC-France (Association for Taxation of Financial Transaction to Aid Citizens) where she also served as vice-president between 1999 and 2006 and remains a member of the scientific council.
Her current work concerns various aspects of neoliberal globalization and ideology, as well as the multiple, ongoing crises that began in 2007-2008, particularly their impact in Europe. In the TNI tradition of “scholar-activist” Susan George has been active in many campaigns. From 1990–1995 she served on the Board of Greenpeace International as well as that of Greenpeace France. She has acted as a consultant to various United Nations specialized agencies.
Key Publications: How to Win the Class War : The Lugano Report II (2013); Whose Crisis, Whose Future? (2010); Hijacking America: How the Religious and Secular Right Changed What Americans Think (2008); We the Peoples of Europe (2008); Another World is Possible if… (2004); The Lugano Report: On preserving capitalism in the 21st century (1999); Faith and Credit: the World Bank’s Secular Empire (with Fabrizio Sabelli, 1994); The Debt Boomerang (1992); Ill Fares the Land (1990); A Fate Worse than Debt (1987); Food for Beginners (1983); How the Other Half Dies: the Real Reasons for World Hunger (1976).
Seda Gürses (TR/US)
Seda Gürses is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Media, Culture and Communications Department at NYU Steinhardt and at the Information Law Institute at New York University Law School working on privacy, security, surveillance studies and requirements engineering. Recently, she has been empirically studying and critically reflecting on the assumptions and methods that inform prominent strands of privacy research within computer science. Further topics of interest in her research include questions of privacy and design in online social networks, anonymity as a cultural and technical phenomenon, feminist critique of computer science and activist use of information technologies.! Previously Seda was a postdoctoral researcher at COSIC (Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography) in the Department of Electrical Engineering of the KU Leuven and, recently, a visiting researcher at the e-Humanities Group of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. She is also a member of the interdisciplinary arts-lab Constant based in Brussels and has taught courses at the Ecole de Recherche Graphique in Brussels and at the Piet Zwart Institute for Media Design and Communication in Rotterdam. She is also one of the original members of the collective de-center based in Berlin.
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Emma Kim Hagdahl
Emma Kim Hagdahl is a Swedish artist, choreographer and dancer living and working in Stockholm. Her recent works are Deep Terra, a collaboration with Atlanta Eke, Epic by Mårten Spångberg. Together with Halla Ólafsdóttir, Kim Hagdahl was the artistic director of Reykjavík Dance Festival ’12: A Series of Events. She is one of the initiators and producers of The Swedish Dance History and The Inpex and works as a supervisor at DOCH in Stockholm. Moreover she choreographed the solo triptych As Found; Name Given By The Spectator, and has been granted several scholarships and residencies, e.g. DanceWeb Europe Vienna, Movement Research New York and Housemate Residency Melbourne. She studied at Laban in London, ex.e.r.ce in Montpellier, was part of MyChoreography and has a degree from DOCH in Stockholm.
During thinking together Emma Kim Hagdahl will focus on work with food and knives together with Christian Töpfner.
Stefano Harney (SG)
Stefano Harney is Professor of Strategic Management Education, Singapore Management University and co-founder of the School for Study, an ensemble teaching project. He employs autonomist and postcolonial theory in looking into issues associated with race, work, and social organization. Recent Publications: The Undercommons: fugitive planning and black study (co-authored with Fred Moten, 2013: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=516); State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (2002) and The Ends of Management (forthcoming). Stefano lives and works in Singapore.
» www.business.smu.edu.sg/directory/stephen-matthias-harney
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Jan Liesegang
Jan Liesegang was born in Cologne in 1968. He studied Architecture in Berlin (TU Berlin), Copenhagen (Kunstakademie) and New York (Cooper Union, School of Architecture). He received a prize for the best Diploma in 1997, worked 3 years for Sauerbruch/Hutton Architects, and was Assistant of Prof. Matthias Sauerbruch as well as Guest Professor at Art Academy Stuttgart and a resident of the Villa Massimo in Rome in 2010. He is a co-founder of raumlaborberlin.
raumlaborberlin was founded as a working group for architecture, art, planning and action in 1999. Taking a process-based approach, the group focuses on urban conditions, working on subjects of temporary architecture and urbanism. In interdisciplinary teams raumlaborberlin elaborates strategies for urban renewal, engaging in urban planning, design and construction of architecture, interactive environments and happenings along with research and teaching in the field of architecture and urban planning. raumlaborberlin seeks a specific analysis, trying to avoid generalisations. In their implementation of large-scale projects, the group develops platform-like structures allowing different actors to collaborate on the overall process. The core group of raumlaborberlin consists of nine people: Andrea Hofmann, Axel Timm, Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius, Christof Mayer, Florian Stirnemann, Francesco Apuzzo, Frauke Gerstenberg, Jan Liesegang, Markus Bader, Matthias Rick (†8.04.2012)
Bernard Lietear (BE)
Bernard Lietaer, author of The Future of Money (translated in 18 languages), is an international expert in the design and implementation of currency systems. He has studied and worked in the field of money for more than 30 years in an unusually broad range of capacities including as a Central Banker, a fund manager, a university professor, and a consultant to governments in numerous countries, multinational corporations, and community organizations. He co-designed and implemented the convergence mechanism to the single European currency system (the Euro) and served as president of the Electronic Payment System at the National Bank of Belgium (the Belgian Central Bank). He co-founded and managed GaiaCorp, a top performing currency fund whose profits funded investments in environmental projects. A former professor of International Finance at the University of Louvain, he has also taught at Sonoma State University and Naropa University. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources of the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, the World Business Academy, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Bernard Lietaer has written numerous books and articles about money systems, including Of Human Wealth (forthcoming, 2011), Monnaies Régionales (2008), and The Mystery of Money (2000).
