Our Faculty
The School of Transnational Organizing is run by the team of European Alternatives, based in Berlin, Paris and Palermo. Get in touch with us if you have any questions, ideas or suggestions. Our programs and courses are run by a global community of experts from activism, community organizing, academia, movement education, and the arts. We especially welcome trainers and lecturers who build bridges between political theory and practice, grassroots activism and social movement research as well as transformative organizing and artivism.
Managing Team
Daniel is a movement researcher and organizing trainer focused on the problem of workers’ organization, power, and strategy. He has participated in workplace, migrant, and housing struggles in the United States and Germany. Through the Werkstatt für Bewegungsbildung, he facilitates spaces where ordinary people can experiment with toolboxes that help them build rewarding, resilient, and politically effective organizations. As a co-host at Spadework podcast, he helps circulate organizing insight more broadly. He lives in Berlin.
Georg leads the School of Political Hope (SPH), develops ideas, thoughts and concepts for a democratic and solidary future - and most of all likes to bring people together to make them a reality ... He was born near Gdansk in 1987 shortly before the peak of the Solidarnosc movement. He is at home in Berlin, studied psychology at the University of Cologne and discovered theatre and activism as an autodidact.
After his school days, he took his first steps with political youth theatre projects. In 2012, the political show "Hope Dies First" and in 2014 the generational performance "Life in Progress" were invited to the political youth theatre festival Festiwalla at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. His interest in working with "real" people also arose from his work as coordinator for "100 Prozent Köln" (2011) by Rimini Protokoll at Schauspiel Köln. Since then he has developed, produced and realised numerous documentary long-term theatre projects with young people, refugees and professional performers.
From 2014 to 2016 he was artistic-paedagogical director of the Junge Akademie der Künste der Welt/Cologne. In 2015, he staged the war phone transcripts of the Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze and her mother in "Phone Calls from the Cemetery". In 2017, he initiated the SPH – a school supporting progressive citizens, communities, movements, labour unions, and civil society organisations with storytelling, community organising and artivism. Georg works for SPH as a facilitator, organiser, educator, artivist, and consultant.
Georg works as Grassroots Organizing & Training Manager for European Alternatives and is responsible for the projects "Trust Beyond Borders", "Workers Without Borders" and the "School of Transnational Activism".
Myriam Zekagh is coordinating EA’s Youth Movement & Campaign Accelerator. As such, she works with young activists and partner organisations throughout Europe to create a space of learning and practice around organising, community building and political activism. Outside of European Alternatives, Myriam works on developing and evaluating projects with high social impact, engaging with local activists, civil society organisations and local authorities outside of Europe, most notably in North Africa, on behalf of European, American and international organisations. Through this work and her training in sociology, she has shown a real interest for social change, and gained solid experience and expertise in conflict resolution, community development projects and participatory processes.
Niccolò is a philosopher and poet. He is a director of European Alternatives, and co-author of "Citizens of Nowhere: How to save Europe from itself" telling the story of 10 years of activism throughout Europe. He is trustee of ECIT Foundation for European Citizenship in Brussels. Between 2018-20 he was a Marie Curie visiting fellow at PUC-Rio De Janeiro and UNAM Mexico. He is part of the advisory board of the NECE network of civic educators, and has been involved in establishing civil society, cultural and political organisations on each side of the Mediterranean in the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings.
Our Trainers & Lecturers
Ann Pettifor is best known for her prediction of the Great Financial Crisis in The Coming First World Debt Crisis (Palgrave 2006). In 2008 co-authored The Green New Deal published by NEF. In 2017 Verso published The Production of Money on the nature of money, debt and the finance sector. She is the author of The Case for The Green New Deal (2019). In 2018 the Heinrich Boll Foundation awarded Pettifor the Hannah Ahrendt Prize. She is a Council member of the Progressive Economy Forum and director of PRIME economics – a network of Keynesian macroeconomists. In 2015 the Rt.Hon Jeremy Corbyn MP appointed her to the Labour Party’s Economic Advisory Committee. She has an honorary doctorate from the University of Newcastle for her work leading an international movement for the cancellation of $150bn of debt owed by 35 low income countries, Jubilee 2000.
Clelia Bartoli is a Researcher at the Department of Law at the University of Palermo, where she teaches “Human Rights”, “Sociology of Law” and “Ethics and the Market”. She deals with Street Law programs within the Legal Clinic for Human Rights of the University of Palermo. “Polipolis” has designed and conducted an educational experimentation for unaccompanied foreign minors, from which “Giocherenda” was born, a company run by young refugees that invents and builds cooperative games. Among her books: Investigation in Ballarò. The right seen from the margin (Navarra 2019); Racists by law. Italy that discriminates (Laterza, 2012); The theory of subordination and the case of Dalits in India (Rubettino: 2008).
Mary Kaldor is an Emeritus Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit in the London School of Economics Department of International Development. Professor Kaldor also directs the unit’s largest research project, the Conflict Research Programme (CRP), an international DFID-funded partnership investigating public authority, through a theoretical lens of the political marketplace and the concept of civicness, across a range of countries in Africa and the Middle East.
Nancy Fraser is an American philosopher, critical theorist, feminist, and the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and professor of philosophy at The New School in New York City. Widely known for her critique of identity politics and her philosophical work on the concept of justice, Fraser is also a staunch critic of contemporary liberal feminism and its abandonment of social justice issues. Fraser holds honorary doctoral degrees from four universities in three countries, and won the 2010 Alfred Schutz Prize in Social Philosophy from the American Philosophical Association. She is President of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division.
Ron is a transdisciplinary activist and campaigner working at the intersection of advocacy and campaigning, human rights, media technology and critical theory. I have co-founded Science for Change Kosovo Movement – a radical youth-led environmental movement. Between 2010-2016, I worked as digital lead at UNICEF's Innovations Lab Kosovo, a unit of UNICEF Kosovo, where they look across sectors and fields to identify methods and technologies that promise to serve children and youth. I worked with various organisations promoting human rights, including Council of Europe, UNDP, etc.
Tobita has been organizing campaigns for corporate accountability and racial and economic justice in Chicago since 2009. He was a key leader in bringing Moral Mondays to Illinois, served as Chair of the Board of Directors of The People's Lobby, and has led trainings on the global economy and globalization on 3 continents. He co-founded Justice Is Global. He holds a Master’s in Philosophy from the University of Chicago and a Master’s of Divinity from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.
Mi is a curator, researcher, and academic on the staff at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM). Her long-term research and curatorial project takes the Silk Road as a figuration for deep-time, deep-space, decentralised, and nomadic imageries. Under this rubric, she has curated a series of performative programs at the Asian Culture Center Theater in Gwangju, South Korea, and at the inaugural Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, Mongolia (2016). Her academic interests are in performance philosophy, science and technology studies, as well as the philosophy of immanence in Eastern and Western traditions. She serves as Director of Arthub in Shanghai and as advisor to the Institute for Provocation in Beijing.
Yvan Sagnet is a Cameroonian activist and non-fiction writer, known for founding the charity No Cap and his work against the exploitation of workers in the Italian agricultural industry.
Our Collaborators
Abou was born in Mali in 1985. After graduating with a degree in English, he worked as a teacher, construction worker, transporter and lecturer. Fleeing from Mali to Germany, he spent 15 months at the border fence in Melilla. With a camera he documented the fates of the people at the border. This resulted in his first directorial effort "Les Sauteurs - Those Who Jump", which premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2016. In 2019 his new documentary film “My New European Life” was released, documenting his isolation in a refugee home, an essayistic reflection on Europe's invisible borders and on filmmaking as an act of self-empowerment.
Anna is an artist, architect, journalist, editor and activist. She is a creative member of the Nordic Folkecenter for Renewable Energy (Denmark); member of the Sinus_3 design and architecture studio (Poland); founder and member of the Polish queer feminist collective Dziewuchy Berlin (Germany); initiator and member of the International Council of Polish Women+ (global). She takes part in exhibitions, develops creative actions, publishes illustrations, lectures about feminist activism and art, sustainable architecture, urban planning and theory. Anna lives in Berlin and Puszczykowo (Poland).
Antje Scharenberg is a postdoctoral researcher and activist with a PhD from the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies department at Goldsmiths, University of London, currently at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Her thesis – titled Trans-Europa: Agency Beyond Borders in Alter-European Activist Networks – is based on a 4-years-long ethnographic research project conducted with transnational civil society organisations between 2016 and 2020. As an activist and ethnographer Antje has worked with different civil society actors including European Alternatives and Another Europe Is Possible, with whom she campaigned for a progressive Europe during and after the UK’s EU referendum in 2016.
One of the central questions driving her thesis and her wider research is how we can enact agency in times of border-crossing challenges that arise, for instance, in the context of migration, climate change or digital capitalism. Her research interests include activism and social movements, transnationalism, globalization, alternative media, new municipalism, feminism, ethnography and engaged methodologies. Antje’s work has appeared in English and German media, including openDemocracy, Soundings, Political Critique, Enorm and DIE ZEIT and was presented at both public and academic conferences. She is the series editor of Other Europes for Soundings – A Journal of Politics and Culture.
Berena is a second generation migrant and political activist. Her experiences of belonging have never based on concepts of identity. The longing for change and the will to join a struggle that is led by a common vision and the desire to win - that is where she finds friends, peers and comrades.
Elena Bianco is a multidisciplinary artist from Milano, currently based in Berlin. Her work is a journey of emotional and social exploration that aims at promoting self-expression, kindness and human connection. She is active in the fields of illustration, graphic design and street installation art.
Eva-Maria Bertschy (Switzerland / Germany / Belgium) works as a freelance dramaturg at the intersection of theatre and political activism in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, D.R. Congo and France. With the Swiss director Milo Rau / International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM) she has conceived and realised numerous productions, international theatre and documentary film projects, political interventions, congresses and other discursive formats. She also works regularly with the Berlin director Ersan Mondtag, the Congolese choreographer Dorine Mokha and the Swiss musician Elia Rediger. Her projects have won numerous awards, been invited to the most important international theatre festivals such as the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Festival d’Avignon and the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, and have been shown in more than 20 countries.
Jonas is a filmmaker, activist, photographer and musician, whose work is centered around global justice. Since 2020 he is working for #LeaveNoOneBehind in campaigning, calling for an immediate evacuation of the refugee camps on the Greek islands, an end of the illegal push-backs at the external European borders like Belarus-Poland or an evacuation of people from Afghanistan. Since 2013 he works and lives between Latin America and Berlin, mainly focusing on a long-term documentary project following protagonists of civil resistance processes calling for social justice and peace in Colombia and indigenous movements across Latin America.
Kasia Wojcik is project coordinator at European Alternatives since october 2021 as well as a dramaturg, curator and poet, working at the intersection of art and activism. She is part of the artists* collective "Staub zu Glitzer" and has worked with director Gesine Danckwart as well as for the Performing Arts Program of LAFT Berlin. She has been a progressive activist for transnational solidarity since 2016. Since 2017 she is part of International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM) by Milo Rau. As a dramaturg and curator she took part in "General Assembly", "The New Gospel" as well as "School of Resistance".
Lorenzo is the founding director of the transnational civil society organisation European Alternatives and one of the initiators of the pan-European movement DiEM25. He has previously worked in publishing and was founding editor of the cultural quarterly Naked Punch. He is an active commentator and public speaker internationally. Lorenzo is also co-author of the book "Citizens of Nowhere".
Tarek is a political scientist, educator, consultant and activist in social, migrant/anti-racist as well as in queer movements. They are currently completing their Master of Arts in Global Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin with support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Previously, they worked as a community organizer in queer communities in Marburg and studied political sciences at Philipps-University of Marburg. Their focus lies on domestic and social movement policies. Tarek deals with social movements, queer politics, police- and migration/border-regimes from both, an academic and a political intersectional perspective. Such a perspective puts an analysis of the social and material formations of class upfront. They are also engaged with the QTI*BIPOC United collective in Berlin and write for media platforms such as analyse&kritik (ak) and wissenschaft und frieden.
Partners
