The Human Show: Innovation through Social Science

Safa Mirror is a trans-disciplinary artist, researcher, and Tarotière, delving in the intersections of art, magick, and mysticism. Her research focuses on analyzing, deconstructing, and contextualizing Middle-Eastern mystical traditions, alongside Western esoteric practices. As a performer, she utilizes her research to decipher, translate and perform the mystical Persian poetry of Rumi, Hafez, Nas...

Ginie Servant-Miklos is an engaged environmental educator with fifteen years of experience in education practice, research, and advocacy. She currently holds an Assistant Professorship in behavioural sciences at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her research and education work focuses on developing innovative pedagogies for societal impact. She de...

Francesco Bravin is a cultural anthropologist and the president and founding member of the Cultural Association Antropolis in Milan. He has a Bachelor's degree in Intercultural Communication at the University of Turin, a Master's degree in Anthropology at the University of Milan Bicocca and a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Genoa. He researched mainly in the field of anthropology of touri...

The Ethnographic Tarot Project intertwines the magic and mystery of tarot with the depth of anthropological inquiry. This initiative seeks to develop a distinctive tarot deck infused with ethnographic and anthropological themes, serving not only as a medium for reflection and divination but also as an innovative teaching tool aimed at enlightening students about the intricacies of ethnographic res...

Dace Dzenovskais Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford and the Principal Investigator of the EMPTINESS project. She holds doctoral and master’s degrees in Social Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an interdisciplinary master’s degree in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University. We are happy to have...

Heli Rantavuo is an applied cultural studies and social sciences researcher based in Helsinki. For the past 15 years, she has worked in the technology industry in London, Stockholm and Helsinki, contributing and leading research in product and market strategy at Spotify, eBay, Microsoft and Nokia. Before working in the industry, she was a researcher at Aalto University, School of Media and Art whe...

We are happy to have Rafram with us speaking to his background as a visual artist and his experience and thoughts on isolation. In 2010, Rafram found himself imprisoned in Lybia. He spent 6 months by himself in an extreme isolation unit, not knowing whether he would live or die. In this conversation he explores questions such as:  What does it mean to be free? What is the value of being with...

Erin B. Taylor & Melanie T. Uy: Anthropologists & Authors of Better Research, Better Design : How to Align Teams and Build a Human-Centric Company Culture. Dr. Erin B. Taylor has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Sydney and is the founder of Finthropology, a company specializing in insights into people’s financial behaviour. She specializes in how people’s financial behaviour is...

Amina Alaoui Soulimani  is a doctoral research fellow at HUMA, the Institute for Humanities in Africa. Amina holds an MSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics. Her current anthropological doctoral work at the University of Cape Town focuses on the ethics of care, AI, and the future hospital in Morocco. Gabriela Cabaña is a Ph. D. candidate at the LSE anthropology departm...

David Prendergast is Head of the Department of Anthropology and Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Maynooth University in Ireland. Previously David worked at Intel where he was a principal investigator at the ‘Technology Research for Independent Living Centre’ and co-founder of the ‘Intel Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities’. He has also served as Visiting Professor of Healthca...

Katia Dumont: Anthropologist, regional network organiser for SE Europe, BMW foundation & speaker at the Why the World needs Anthropologists, Re|Generation 23-25 Sept 2022 Berlin Katia Dumont is a Regional Network Organizer for Southwestern Europe for the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt. Prior to joining the Foundation, she was a consultant for foundations and social enterprises in venture philan...

Sophie Strand: writer and academic cross-contaminator: on the ways we can improvise in academia and beyond. Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Her first book...

Rebecca Price is a researcher and assistant professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology where she investigates how design can advance sectors and industries through multi-leveled and networked innovation. Educated and practiced as an industrial designer, Rebecca was quickly drawn to the strategic potential of design as a source of resilience...

Pavel Cenkl is currently the Head of Schumacher College and Director of Learning at Dartington Trust, Devon, England and previously he held the position of Professor of Environmental Humanities and Associate Dean at Sterling College, Vermont. Pavel holds a Ph. D. in English and is the author of many articles, chapters, and two books. He has always been drawn to colleges and universities whose curr...

Vito Laterza is an anthropologist, development scholar and political analyst. He holds a MPhil in Social Anthropological Research and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Vito is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development and Planning, University of Agder, Norway, where he also leads the Digitalization and Sustainability focus area at the uni...

Désirée Driesenaar is an innovation activist, blue economy specialist, storyteller as well as external expert for the European Commission. After years of working in the corporate world as a commercial manager and B2B marketer, in 2014 Desirée went for a holistic shift and became an entrepreneur for a regenerative future. In search of purpose and sustainability, she developed a worldview of sy...

Kathleen leads Research & Insights at Dreams, a Fintech company built on behavioral science that boosts financial wellbeing. She is a Dutch national currently based in Stockholm and has worked with UX research for over a decade. Her main interests are innovation and technology with social impact, always trying to connect the dots between people off- and online. Besides working at Dreams she al...

Eric Garza is the founder and primary instructor at Quillwood Academy, an online institution of higher learning dedicated to helping people throughout the English-speaking world learn to navigate the changing world in which we all live. His background is diverse, spanning ecology and evolution, environmental science and policy, ecological economics, and systems thinking. Eric has also invested yea...

Angelina Kussy is an economic anthropologist from Warsaw and activist with Barcelona en Comú , the citizen platform governing Barcelona, working for municipalism and Fearless Cities . We are happy to have Angelina with us speaking to her background and current work.  Angelina shares her views and dialectical relationship to activism & scholarship and takes us through the multiple projects she is c...

We are happy to have Cristina with us speaking to her background and current work. Cristina shares her views and relationship to activism and, as a scholar, the importance of balancing sympathy with a critical, analytical and self-reflexive research lens. What can an ethnographic perspective bring different than other research methods? What is the difference of applying ethnographic research to ac...

Julienne Weegels is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Amsterdam’s Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA). Her research interests include violence, (in)security, memory-making, and criminalization. For this ethnographic project, she carried out 31 months of field research with Nicaraguan inmates, through two theater programs in two prisons (a s...

Alex Khasnabish  is a writer, researcher, and teacher committed to collective liberation living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. He is a Professor in Sociology & Anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University. His research focuses on radical imagination, radical politics, social justice, and social movements. His recent books include What MovesUs: The...

Today’s episode is an experiment to stretch out disciplinary boundaries by paring up academic debates of philosophy & engineering (& of course anthropology). We are delighted to have with us academics & practitioners representing those different disciplines. What are the personal definitions of multidiscipinarity that make sense to Simone, Gunter and Marcus? We discuss proliferation of academic ou...

Mark Vacher is an associate professor of ethnology at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Tom O’Dell is a professor of ethnology at Lund University, Sweden, whose own research has primarily focused upon the cultural economy, the significance of mobility and transnational cultural processes.   Mark and Tom have collaborated for many years on developing programs of applied ethnogr...

We are pleased to have Ferne with us talking about anthropology of food – a field that has been at the core of her research and professional focus for the last 17 years. How did food become Ferne’s topic? What were the drivers that moved her anthropological research from food, to sustainable city movements to political ecology? Ferne describes herself as an activist scholar and describes the way s...