Introducing our speakers
With interventions from AI WEIWEI, CORY DOCTOROW, ELOÏSE BAJOU, EYAL WEIZMAN, HATICE CENGIZ, IAN COBAIN, JACK POULSON, JANINA FINDEISEN, JIAYANG FAN, NABIHA SYED, NICHOLSON BAKER, STELLA MORIS, and TIM MAUGHAN, this year’s symposium will be bringing together some of the world’s most creative thinkers to discuss how best to take advantage of our new collective intelligence, and how to build better international alliances against the encroachment of surveillance, official secrecy and censorship.
We’ll be posting more announcements in the coming weeks, with lots of new speakers, workshops, Open Lab projects and more.
Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei is renowned for making strong aesthetic statements that resonate with timely phenomena across today’s geopolitical world. From architecture to installations, social media to documentaries, Ai Weiwei uses a wide range of media as expressions of new ways for his audiences to examine society and its values.
Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently Radicalized and Walkaway, science fiction for adults, In Real Life, a graphic novel; Information Doesn't Want To Be Free, a book about earning a living in the Internet age, and Homeland, a YA sequel to Little Brother.
Eloïse Bajou
Eloïse Bajou is a French journalist and photographer as well as a member of Reporters En Colère (REC), a journalist collective created in 2019 that aims to give tools to field reporters when they experience press freedom restrictions.
Eyal Weizman
Eyal Weizman is an architect, professor of spatial and visual cultures and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2010 he set up the research agency Forensic Architecture (FA) and in 2007 he set up, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine.
Hatice Cengiz
Hatice Cengiz is a Turkish academic and researcher in middle Eastern studies, and has published academic articles and a book on Gulf Countries. She is the partner of slain Washington Post editorialist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
Ian Cobain
Ian Cobain was born in Liverpool in 1960. He has been a journalist since the early 1980s and was an investigative reporter with the Guardian. He is now a senior reporter for Middle East Eye. His inquiries into the UK’s involvement in torture since 9/11 have won a number of major awards, including the Martha Gellhorn Prize and the Paul Foot Award for investigative journalism.
Jack Poulson
Dr. Jack Poulson is the Executive Director of tech accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry. He completed his PhD in Computational and Applied Mathematics at UT Austin in 2012 before serving as an Assistant Professor of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech then as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics as Stanford University.
Janina Findeisen
Janina Findeisen is an anthropologist, investigative journalist and researcher with a MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology (FU Berlin) and Comparative Studies of Religion and European Anthropology (HU Berlin).
Jiayang Fan
Jiayang Fan became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2016. Her reporting on China, American politics, and culture has appeared in the magazine since 2010. Her latest article is “How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda.“
Nabiha Syed
Nabiha Syed is the President of The Markup, a new investigative journalism startup that explores how powerful actors use technology to reshape society. Previously, she was Vice President and Associate General Counsel at BuzzFeed.
Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Baker is the author of eighteen books, among them The Mezzanine, Human Smoke, The Anthologist, and Substitute. He’s written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books.
Stella Moris
Stella Moris is a South Africa-born human rights lawyer. Stella is the fiancée of Julian Assange and mother of his two children. She is fighting against Julian’s extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States.
Tim Maughan
Tim Maughan is an author and journalist using both fiction and non-fiction to explore issues around cities, class, culture, technology, and the future. His work regularly appears on the BBC, New Scientist, and Vice/Motherboard.
Published: 06 Oct 2020
Location: Online
This event will be recorded