Yanis Varoufakis
Economist, Author & Member of the Greece's Parliament
Yanis Varoufakis is a member of Greece’s Parliament and parliamentary leader of MeRA25, the Greek political party belonging to DiEM25 – Europe’s first transnational paneuropean movement. Previously, he served as Greece’s Finance Minister during the first six months of 2015.
Varoufakis read mathematics and economics at the Universities of Essex and Birmingham and subsequently taught economics at the Universities of East Anglia, Cambridge, Sydney, Glasgow, Texas and Athens where he still holds a Chair in Political Economy and Economic Theory. He is also Honorary Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Honoris Causa Professor of Law, Economics and Finance at the University of Torino, Visiting Professor of Political Economy at King’s College, London, and Doctor of the University Honoris Causa at University of Sussex.
He is the author of a number of best-selling books, including Another Now: Dispatches from an alternative present (London: Bodley Head, 2020), Adults in the Room: My struggle against Europe’s Deep Establishment (London: Bodley Head, 2017) and Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A brief history of capitalism (London: Bodley Head, 2017).
In his own words, Varoufakis was “thrust onto the public scene by Europe’s inane handling of an inevitable crisis”. In January 2015 he was elected to Greece's Parliament with the largest majority in the country and served as Greece’s Finance Minister (January to July 2015). During his term he experienced first hand the authoritarian inefficiency of the European Union’s institutions and had to negotiate with the Eurogroup, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Varoufakis resigned from the finance ministry when he refused to sign a loan agreement that perpetuated Greece’s debt-deflationary cycle.
In February 2016 Varoufakis co-founded DiEM25, the Democracy in Europe Movement - Europe’s first transnational movement. In March 2018 DiEM25 founded MeRA25, its Greek political party. Led by Varoufakis, MeRA25 entered Parliament with nine MPs in the July 2019 General Election.
Dr Kira Vinke
Project Lead of East Africa Peru India Climate Capacities (EPICC), Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Dr. Kira Vinke works at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research as the project lead of EPICC (East Africa Peru India Climate Capacities), an interdisciplinary project on the co-production of knowledge about regional climate and hydrological systems and their interactions with agricultural livelihoods, human migration and security. Dr. Vinke is the co-chair of the Advisory Board to the Federal German Government on Civilian Crisis Prevention and Peacebuilding.
Previously, she was an analyst for the German Advisory Council on Global Change to the Federal Government (WBGU) at PIK. As a consultant she has worked for the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) on the nexus between climate change and migration into cities in Southern Bangladesh and on climate migration policies in the Caribbean and the Pacific. 2016 and 2017 Ms. Vinke was an external consultant for the Asian Development Bank and developed the flagship report "A Region at Risk - The Human Dimensions of Climate Change in Asia and the Pacific."
Ms. Vinke completed her doctoral dissertation at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on the subject of climate change and migration. Her studies were funded by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and she completed part of her field research on a voyage with the Okeanos Foundation to outer island communities in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. For her excellent dissertation she received the "Potsdamer Nachwuchswissenschaftler-Preis", a prize for young scientists by the city of Potsdam.
Dr Karamba Diaby
SPD Member of the German Parliament (Bundestag), Integration Commissioner of the SPD Parliamentary Group
Dr. Karamba Diaby, born in 1961 in Marsassoum, Senegal, was elected to the German Bundestag in 2013, the first black person born in Africa to do so.
From 2009 to 2015, he was also a city councilor in Halle an der Saale and worked as an advisor in the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs of the state of Saxony-Anhalt from 2011 to 2013.
In his mid-20s, he came to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) thanks to a scholarship, studied chemistry at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. In 1991, he was awarded his master’s degree and in 1996 his doctorate in geoecology.
Afterwards, he worked in various nonprofit organizations in the fields of education, youth policy, diversity and human rights.
During the 18th legislative term in the Bundestag, Diaby has served as deputy chairman of the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid and a member of the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment. The 59-year-old politician moved back into the German Bundestag in 2017, where he is a member of the Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment, the Subcommittee on Civic Engagement and continues to be a member of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb). Since March 2018, he has also been a member of the executive committee of the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag. In September of the same year, he was also elected as his parliamentary group's new integration commissioner. Diaby is married and lives with his wife and two children in Halle (Saale).
Anna von Gruenewaldt
Speech scientist, moderator and organiser of "Lange Woche der Nachhaltigkeit".
Anna von Gruenewaldt creates and moderates spaces for encounter, togetherness and encouragement. She works on various forms of good coexistence and organises the “Lange Woche der Nachhaltigkeit” (Long Week of Sustainability) in Halle, which will take place from September 4th to October 8th, 2021.
Prof Dr Marie-Claire Foblets
Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,
Marie-Claire Foblets is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where she was Managing Director from July 2015 to January 2021. She is head of the Department of Law & Anthropology, which she founded in 2012. She is also Professor of Law at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) and an honorary professor at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the University of Leipzig.
She has been teaching law and social and cultural anthropology at the universities of Antwerp and Brussels for over twenty years. Before becoming a member of the Max Planck Society in March 2012, she was a full-time professor at KUL, where she was head of the Institute for Migration Law and Legal Anthropology. She is a member of many academic networks that focus on research on the application of Islamic law in Europe and on law and migration in Europe, including the Association française d'anthropologie du droit (AFAD), of which she was co-president for several years.
In 2001, Professor Foblets was elected to the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB). In 2004, she received the Francqui Prize, the most prestigious academic award in the humanities in Belgium. In 2016 she received an honorary doctorate from the Law Faculty at the Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, Brussels, Belgium, and in 2019 from the Law Faculty at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. She became a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Philological-Historical Class) in February 2015.