Director: Björn Bohnenkamp
Coordination: Lisa Wiedemann
Events, Communication & Network: Marlene May
PhD Candidates: Marcel Erik Lemmer & Ioannis Theocharis & Marlene May
Björn holds a PhD in Theatre, Film and Movie Studies from Cologne University and a PhD in Business Administration with focus in Marketing from Münster University. As a media culture scientist, he is fascinated by how popular media shape the way we perceive reality. He spent years in Göttingen studying how generational identities are constructed and interact with other identity offerings. He then studied consumer culture theory in Weimar and Münster and its potential to critically reflect on consumer practices and their embedding in our culture. Since his appointment to a professorship at the Karlshochschule, he has been trying to encourage students to rethink marketing.
Lisa has a social sciences background and studied both in France and Germany with a strong focus on transborder collaboration. Since then, she has been interested in all kinds of cross-border cooperation: international, interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, intergenerational, intercultural, etc. Always on the lookout for new encounters, she has worked in different countries where she coordinated various co-funded projects to bring together diverse individuals, organizations, institutions, companies and research disciplines. What she enjoys most is coordinating projects that promote a change of perspectives.
Marlene studied Arts and Cultural Management and Management with a specialization in „Human Resources & Diversity“ and „Creativity & Innovation“ at Karlshochschule International University in Karlsruhe. In addition to her work in the real-world laboratory „Future Democracies“ at Karlshochschule in the position as „Academic Outreach and Local Networks Coordinator“, she works in her research on topics of social and digital transformation as well as self, identity and representation in social virtual environments and realities, including different perspectives on identity, digital spaces and virtual communities. Additionally, Marlene is a doctoral candidate at the Universität Konstanz in cooperation with Karlshochschule in the field of media studies on the topic of social VR, identity and (sub-)communities.
Marcel is a doctoral candidate at Goethe University Frankfurt, specializing in statehood, civil society, and extremist movements. He studied sociology, political science, and aesthetics in Frankfurt and Vienna, providing him with a strong interdisciplinary foundation. His active participation in university groups and various social initiatives reflects his commitment to promoting democratic processes. With his international experience and research on disinformation and extremism, he brings valuable insights into contemporary societal challenges.
Through his studies in biomedical engineering, Ioannis developed a deep understanding of dynamic processes, feedback loops and thresholds in systems. He was able to apply a probabilistic perspective to phenomena and realized that thresholds can make a qualitative difference in how systems reproduce themselves. However, this did not fully prepare him to understand socio-technical economic systems. This realization led him to further study economics, with a focus on ecological and political economy, where he learned to recognize the limits of win-win narratives. He also realized that structural perspectives alone are not enough to understand democracies. In the following phase of his academic career in the social sciences, he applied transdisciplinary approaches and used methods from future literacy to investigate the mental infrastructures of individuals that maintain system path dependency.