Participants

Hunter Beaumont (Munich, Germany)

Hunter Beaumont, clinical psychologist and systemic therapist, is the Founding President of the International Systemic Constellations Association and program director of the annual International Intensive Workshop in Family Constellations. He is a trainer, supervisor and advocate of an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to psychotherapy. He is a member of the American Psychological Association and the German Psychological Association.

Ralph Bollmann (Berlin, Germany)

The journalist and author Ralph Bollmann studied history, political science and public law in Tübingen, Bologna and Berlin and subsequently attended the Deutsche Journalistenschule in Munich. He headed the national desk and Berlin parliamentary office of “die tageszeitung.” Since 2011, he has been economic policy correspondent for the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.” In fall 2010, Bollmann was Journalist in Residence at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. His publications include “Lob des Imperiums: Der Untergang Roms und die Zukunft des Westen.”

Christina von Braun (Berlin, Germany)

The cultural scholar, gender theorist, author and filmmaker Christina von Braun has been a professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 1994, where she holds the Chair in Cultural Theory with a focus in gender and history. She is responsible for some fifty documentary films and television productions on topics from cultural history and has published numerous books and essays on the interrelationship between the history of the mind and history of the body. Her publications include “Stille Post: Eine andere Familiengeschichte” (2007), “Glauben, Wissen und Geschlecht in den drei Religionen des Buches” (2008) and, most recently, “Der Preis des Geldes” (2012). As of 2012 she is spokeswoman for the Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg.

Eric Brian (Paris, France)

Eric Brian is full professor at Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and teaches at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. As a sociologist and a historian of the sciences, he is studying uncertainty and regularity of social phenomena, and in particular how scientists have caught and conceived them as objects of mathematics or social and economical sciences. He is in charge of the Department of History in the French National Institute for Demography and the editor of the “Revue de synthèse” (Springer). He completed PhDs in applied mathematics and social sciences. He has been fellow of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University (1984–1988), of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (1995) and of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2002–2003). Frequently invited at the University of Vienna since 1997, he was guest professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2002), the Technische Universität Berlin (2003) and the University of Geneva (2010). Among his publications are “Staatsvermessungen. Condorcet, Laplace, Turgot und das Denken der Verwaltung” (2001), “The Descent of Human Sex-ratio at Birth. A Dialogue between Mathematics, Biology and Sociology” (2007), “Le Sexisme de la première heure. Hasard et sociologie” (2007) and “Comment tremble la main invisible. Incertitude et marchés” (2009).

Michael C. Burda (Berlin, Germany)

Michael C. Burda, a macroeconomist from the United States, studied economics at Harvard and Göttingen. He teaches at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he has headed the Institute for Economic Theory II since 1993. Since 2007, he has also been Visiting Professor at the European School of Management and Technology. His fields of research include macroeconomics, labor economics and European integration. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the Institute for the Study of Labor, as well as a Fellow of the European Economic Association. His publications include the fifth edition of the widely used textbook “Macroeconomics: A European Text” (2009).

Bureau d’Etudes (Paris, France)

Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt, who form the Paris-based artist group Bureau d’Etudes, specialize in creating cartographies of contemporary political, social and economic systems. Their visual analyses of transnational capitalism are usually presented as huge murals. These are designed to expose that which is hidden. The interests and cooperative relationships they visualize draw attention tocontexts and facets of their subjects that are normally invisible.

Peter Eigen (Berlin, Germany)

Prof. Dr. Peter Eigen, a lawyer by training, worked for the World Bank for many years as a manager of programs in Africa and Latin America before founding Transparency International (TI) in 1993. He chaired the organization until 2005 and today chairs the TI Advisory Council. He has taught law and political science at Frankfurt am Main, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and the College of Europe in Brussels. Since 2002, he has been Honorary Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin and, since 2007, a member of the Africa Progress Panel (APP) headed by Kofi Annan. Peter Eigen is a member of the steering committee of the NGO Ärzte für die Dritte Welt (German Doctors for Developing Countries), has served on the advisory council of the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, Freiburg, since 2011, and is on the board of trustees of the Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governance, Berlin. He co-founded and chaired the Berlin Civil Society Center.

Elena Esposito (Bologna, Italy)

Elena Esposito teaches Sociology of Communication at the University of Modena-Reggio Emilia. She published many works on the theory of social systems, media theory and sociology of financial markets. Among them “The Future of Futures. The Time of Money in Financing and Society”, 2011; “Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität”, 2007; “Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode”, 2004; “Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft”, 2002.

Aris Fioretos (Stockholm, Sweden / Berlin, Germany)

Swedish author Aris Fioretos lives in Stockholm und Berlin. Fioretos studied comparative literature at Stockholm University, the École des hautes études and Yale University. He has translated works by such authors as Paul Auster, Friedrich Hölderlin and Vladimir Nabokov. Last year he took up a three-year post as Dag Hammerskjöld Visiting Professor at the Northern Europe Institute of Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Since 2011, he has served as Vice President of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. His last novel, “Der letzte Grieche,” published in 2011, has received numerous honors. His newest work, “Die halbe Sonne,” is to be released in early 2013 by the Carl Hanser Verlag.

Michael Freund (Vienna, Austria)

Journalist Michael Freund is a professor at Webster University Vienna as well as an editor and writer for the daily newspaper “Der Standard.” He studied in Vienna, Heidelberg and New York, earning a doctorate in social psychology from Columbia University in 1978. In 1979, he returned to Vienna. He undertook a follow-up study to “Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal” fifty years after this classic sociological investigation of 1933. He worked regularly for radio and print media, including as an editor at “Der Standard” (in charge of the weekend supplement) from 1989. In 2003 he became head of the Media Communications Department at Webster University Vienna. His areas of focus are culture, popular culture, and American politics and media.

Wanda Golonka (Berlin, Germany)

Wanda Golonka was born in Lyon in 1958. She trained in dance at Centre de Danse International Rosella Hightower in Cannes and Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen. In 1985, she founded the Gruppe Neuer Tanz, which she led until 1995. From 2001 to 2009, she was the in-house director and a member of the management team at Schauspiel Frankfurt. In 2007, she completed training in “Healing the Light Body” at The Four Winds Society in the USA. She founded WAKA in 2010 in order to create a new structure in which to advance energy medicine. She is currently developing WAKA in Berlin with an international ensemble of healers.

Ulrike Harms (Berlin, Germany)

Neurologist Ulrike Harms was born in East Berlin in 1969. She received early musical training in flute, violin and piano and went on to study music in Berlin and Hanover. This was followed by a long period of activity as a violinist in chamber orchestras, orchestras and operas in Germany and abroad. Parallel to her musical career, she studied medicine at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she also earned her doctorate. Harms currently works at the Charité as a neurologist, neuroscientist and lecturer. She is additionally trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Berliner Institut für Psychotherapie und Psychoanalyse.

Marcel Hénaff (San Diego, USA)

Marcel Hénaff, a philosopher and anthropologist, is since 1988 professor at the University of California, San Diego. He has studied Philosophy at the Universities of Lyon and Paris, and ethnology at the University of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He has taught at the University of Copenhagen, at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, at Johns Hopkins University and Kyoto University. His publications include Sade, the invention of the libertine body (University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1998; orig. French 1991); Public Space and Democracy (coedited with Tracy Strong, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001); Le Prix de la vérité. Le don, l’argent, la philosophie, Paris, Le Seuil, 2002 [transl. Der Preis der Wahrheit, Suhrkamp, 2009; The Price of Truth. Gift, Money, Philosophy, Stanford UP 2010]; La Ville qui vient [City in the making] Paris, L’Herne, 2008; Le Passeur de sens [The Carrier of Meaning], Perrin, Paris, 2009); Le Don des philosophes [Philosophers’s Gift], Paris Le Seuil, 2012 [to appear at Transcript Verlag 2013] – His main field of research is political philosophy and anthropology of political institutions and symbolic practices. Le Prix de la vérité has received the 2002 Grand Prix de Philosophie of French Academy.

Ulrike Herrmann (Berlin, Germany)

Ulrike Herrmann is economic correspondent for “die tageszeitung.” Originally trained as a bank clerk, she went on to attend the Henri-Nannen-Schule and study history and philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. She subsequently became a research associate at the Körber Foundation and the press spokeswoman for Krista Sager, the Hamburg Senator responsible for equal opportunity. Since 2000, she has held various positions at “die tageszeitung,” including parliamentary correspondent and op-ed desk chief. She is the author of the book “Hurra, wir dürfen zahlen: Der Selbstbetrug der Mittelschicht” (2012).

Jochen Hörisch (Mannheim, Germany)

Jochen Hörisch, a scholar of literature and media, studied German, philosophy and history in Düsseldorf. Since 1988, he has been a full professor of modern German literature and qualitative media analysis at the Universität Mannheim as well as a member of the Freie Akademie der Künste in Hamburg. He has been a visiting professor at the Universität Klagenfurt, the Collège international de philosophie and the École normale supérieure in Paris, and at the University of Virginia, Princeton University and Indiana University in the USA. His publications include “Gott, Geld und Medien” (2004) and “Tauschen, sprechen, begehren: Eine Kritik der unreinen Vernunft” (2011). He launched the debt repayment initiative “Hurra, wir tilgen!”.

Michael Hutter (Berlin, Germany)

The economist and sociologist Michael Hutter studied mathematics in Munich and in Portland, USA, and subsequently obtained his master’s degree in economics in Seattle, USA. Since receiving his postdoctoral qualification, he has dedicated his research efforts primarily to the interplay of development processes in art, culture and the economy. For many years, Hutter held the Chair in Theory of the Economy and its Environment at the private Universität Witten/Herdecke. He is currently a research professor for culture, knowledge and innovation in the Department of Sociology at the Technische Universität Berlin. Since March 2008, he has led the research unit Cultural Sources of Newness at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB). His publications include “Neue Medienökonomik” (2006) and “Wertwechselstrom: Texte zu Kunst und Wirtschaft” (2010).

Maurizio Lazzarato (Paris, France)

Maurizio Lazzarato, sociologist and philosopher, lives and works in Paris. He conducts research on immaterial work, the ontology of work, post-socialist movements and cognitive capitalism. He additionally writes on the subjects of cinema, video and new technologies for the production of images. Jointly with Groupe Knobotic Research, he developed the project “10_dencies/ travail immaterielle” for the Venice Biennale, and he has produced video installations with Angela Melitopoulos. Most recently, Lazzarato has dealt with various forms of insecure work – taking as a starting point the situation of artists and technicians whose employment is limited to, for example, the periods of production of films. His book “The Making of the Indebted Man” (2012) takes on the subject of debt.

Maria-Sibylla Lotter (Stuttgart, Germany / Zurich, Switzerland)

Maria-Sibylla Lotter studied philosophy, religious studies and ethnology in Germany and the USA. She then worked as a research assistant, lecturer and substitute professor of philosophy at various German and Swiss universities. She currently teaches as an adjunct professor at the Universität Zürich and as a substitute professor at the Universität Stuttgart, lecturing on diverse subjects such as metaphysics, the fundamental principles of the cultural sciences, practical philosophy and the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Her publications include Whiteheads Metaphysik der Subjektivität, journal articles on the history of philosophy and the theory of normativity, a translation of Stanley Cavell’s book Cities of Words and a treatise, recently published by Suhrkamp, on guilt, shame and responsibility.

Wolfgang Pircher (Vienna, Austria)

Wolfgang Pircher is a retired adjunct professor from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. After completing his training in electronics and electrical communication technology, he studied economics and philosophy, earning a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1983. He was involved in the project “Von der politischen zur reinen Ökonomie” at the Vienna University of Economics and Business from 1993 to 1998. He was also curator of the exhibitions “Wunderblock: Eine Geschichte der modernen Seele” (Vienna 1989) and “Sozialmaschine Geld” (Linz 1999/2000). Pircher is a member of the network “Knowledge in the Making: Drawing and Writing as Research Techniques,” a joint research initiative between two Max Planck Society organizations, the Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Art Historical Institute in Florence). In 2011, he was a Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Sasha Pirker (Vienna, Austria)

Filmmaker Sasha Pirker was born in Vienna in 1969. She was educated in the fields of linguistics and Romance studies. From 1995 to 2000, she was curator for contemporary architecture at the Architekturzentrum in Vienna. Since 2006, she has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she is a full professor for the subject of video and video installation. Her works were presented in the monographic show “Die denkende Form” at the 2011 Viennale – Vienna International Film Festival. Her film “The Future Will Not Be Capitalist” (2010) appeared at the 67th Venice International Film Festival.

Birger P. Priddat (Witten, Germany)

The philosopher and economist Birger P. Priddat studied economics, philosophy and work psychology. He was offered the Chair of Economics and Philosophy on the Faculty of Economics at Universität Witten/Herdecke in 1991, and was Dean of the Faculty from 1995 to 2000. Since 2007, he has held the Chair of Political Economy on the Faculty of Economics at Universität Witten/Herdecke. He is also a Visiting Professor at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen. Priddat was a Fellow at the research institute Zentrum für Religion, Wirtschaft und Politik at Universität Basel from 2010 to 2012, and at the Center of Excellence at Universität Konstanz (Cultural Sciences, subgroup “Unknowing”) from 2011 to 2012. His monograph “Akteure, Verträge, Netzwerke: Der kooperative Modus der Ökonomie,” published in February 2012, draws on his intensive research on the theory of political economy, the future of work and the history of economic thought.

Rica zu Salm-Rechberg (Berlin, Germany)

Rica zu Salm-Rechberg, originally trained in education, lives in Berlin, where she has operated her own systemic therapy and coaching practice since 1993. She is a therapist trainer for systemic constellations (DGfS), systemic therapist and non-medical psychotherapist. Salm-Rechberg is the chief spokeswoman for the DGfS Regionalgruppe Berlin / Neue Bundesländer (eastern German states), has published works on the practice of systemic constellations, leads seminars in Germany and abroad, and is head of the West-Ost Institut für angewandte Psychologie und psychotherapeutische Medizin in Berlin.

Tomáš Sedlácek (Prague, Czech Republic)

Tomas Sedlacek is the Chief Macro-Economist of CSOB Bank, the largest Czech bank, lectures at Charles University, and is a member of the National Economic Council in Prague. He worked as an advisor of Vaclav Havel, the first Czech President after the fall of communism, and is a regular columnist and popular radio and TV commentator. He has earned his PhDr. degree with honors at Charles University, where he lectures Philosophy of Economics. He was named one of the “young guns” and one of the “five hot minds in economics” by the Yale Economic Review. In 2009 he published a book on philosophy, ethics and history of economic thought “Economics of Good and Evil”, which has become a national bestseller, later adopted as theatre piece which keeps selling out the National Theatre in Prague.

Leopold Seiler (Vienna / Austria)

Asset manager Leopold Seiler was born in 1969 in Vienna. He interrupted his law studies a number of times for periods of training abroad. In 1989, he joined Austria’s first non-bank-affiliated asset management company (VPM Gruppe) and in 1992 founded the consultancy SAM – Seiler Asset Management. Alongside his activity as an investment consultant, he gives talks all over Europe on the subject of economic ethics. He is also a lecturer on ethics and portfolio management at Danube University Krems and the FH Wien University of Applied Sciences, Vienna. His current projects involve connecting microfinance with repatriation support as an alternative approach in European migration policy.

Stephan Seiter (Reutlingen, Germany)

Economist Stephan Seiter teaches economics and quantitative methods at the ESB Business School Reutlingen. He is also dean of studies of the MBA program in International Management. The focuses of his research include foreign trade, the theory and policy of growth and business cycles, the labor market and technological progress. He has worked in national and international research projects devoted to these topics. Seiter is the editor of “Neuere Entwicklungen in der Wachstumstheorie und der Wachstumspolitik” (2005), a volume on current phenomena of economic growth, with contributions examining structural change and technological unemployment as well as industrial, regional, social and environmental policy aspects.

Ulrike Vedder (Berlin, Germany)

Ulrike Vedder has held a professorship in the Department of German Literature at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2009. The literary themes of entanglement, attachment, guilt and debt are a recurring focus in her work – in her doctoral thesis on the media discourse on love, in a book on the subject of generation and intergenerationality, and in her postdoctoral qualification on the topic of inheritance: “Das Testament als literarisches Dispositiv: Kulturelle Praktiken des Erbes in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts.” She conducts research in such areas as the poetics of knowledge, gender studies, the afterlife of the dead and the cultural transformation of things. She is co-editor of “Zeitschrift für Germanistik” and a member of the jury of the Franz Hessel Prize for contemporary literature.

Elisabeth Weber (Santa Barbara, USA)

Elisabeth Weber teaches German literature and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of “Verfolgung und Trauma: Zu Emmanuel Levinas’ Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence” (1990), and has translated and published a number of books by Jacques Derrida. In 1994, she published the collected volume “Jüdisches Denken in Frankreich: Gespräche mit Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jacques Derrida, Rita Thalmann, Emmanuel Levinas, Léon Poliakov, Jean-François Lyotard, Luc Rosenzweig.” With Christoph Tholen, she co-edited “Das Vergessen(e): Anamnesen des Undarstellbaren,” which was published in 1997. Weber’s recent publications include the essay “Literary justice? Poems from Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp” as well as the collected volumes “Speaking about Torture and Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Peace and Violence.”

Sigrid Weigel (Berlin, Germany)

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Sigrid Weigel is Director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin and a professor at the Department of Philosophy and the History of Literature, Science and Technology at the Technische Universität Berlin. She has headed the projects “Figurations of the Martyr,” “The Face as Artifact,” “Cultural Semantics of Georgia,” “Skull Base Knowledge,” “Susan Taubes – Edition,” and “Testimony: A Controversial Concept,” and repeatedly established the relationship between guilt and debt in the context of cultural memory, Holocaust post-history and the generational discourse. Among other commitments, Weigel serves on the Kleist Prize jury and chairs the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lichtenberg Kolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) at Universität Göttingen. Her publications include “Grammatologie der Bilder” (at press); “Literatur als Voraussetzung der Kulturgeschichte;” “Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften;” and “Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy.”

Holger Zschäpitz (Berlin, Germany)

Holger Zschäpitz is the chief economics editor at “Welt”and “Welt am Sonntag.” He specializes in the areas of behavioral economics, public finances and capital markets. A data processing technician from Leipzig in the former East Germany, Zschäpitz experienced a national bankruptcy for the first time in 1989 – and benefited greatly from it, going on to study economics and journalism. Zschäpitz is active in the blogosphere under the Twitter alias @Schuldensuehner. With Kai Konrad, he co-authored “Schulden ohne Sühne?.” Published by dtv this year in an updated paperback edition, the book examines nations’ debt addiction generally, and the Euro debt crisis in particular.

Additionally:

Irini Athanassakis (Berlin, Germany / Paris, France)

Irini Athanassakis is a visual artist, author and independent project-maker of Austrian and Greek descent who works at the intersection of art, gender and oikonomia. She studied European business management in Reutlingen and London, as well as visual and transmedial art in Vienna, where she earned her doctorate in art history and art and knowledge transfer. Her book “Die Aktie als Bild” (2008) examines company shares as cultural objects and images. In articles, images and objects, Athanassakis probes the meaning and impact of symbols, terms and things from the field of oikonomia – most recently in “bilan des bilans” (2012).

Thomas Macho (Berlin, Germany)

The cultural scientist and philosopher Thomas Macho has been a professor of cultural history at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 1993. At the university, he co-founded the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik and has served as Dean of the Philosophy Faculty III (2006 to 2008) and Director of the Institute for Cultural History and Theory (2009 to 2011). He has also been a Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (2008 to 2009). His research focuses on, among other things, the history of time reckoning, the cultural history of human-animal relationships, death and funerary cults. His publications include “Vorbilder” (2011) and “Das Leben ist ungerecht” (2010).