How our childhood and youth is being stolen by Silicon Valley

by Ole Tarp

This workshop will be about something that affects nearly every child, every teenager and every family which comes from the powerful, and often invisible grip Silicon Valley has on our youngest generation. In just over a decade, smartphones and social media have reshaped what it means to grow up.

Playgrounds have been replaced by platforms. Conversations replaced by clicks. Children now spend more time online than in the real world. And behind every swipe and scroll there is a billion-dollar industry engineered to capture attention, and shaping behavior therefore keeping young users permanently hooked. We currently see a rise in levels of anxiety, loneliness, depression and self-harm, and this is not a coincidence. This workshop will explore how Big Tech designs structures that are directly affecting the brains of children at large. Let us also talk about solutions and what it is we can do.

Pension Plan

by Stef Kuypers

Stef Kuypers is a Belgian researcher specializing in behavioral and monetary economics. He began his career in IT and enriched his expertise with creative thinking, improvisation techniques, coaching practices, and business interventions. Equipped with this diverse background, he ventured into the fields of economics, monetary systems, complexity theory, and human behavior. Money is everywhere in our lives and society. Although we feel the effects when there is not enough available, we never really think about how money ‘works’, whether it can be designed to work differently, and what the effects would be.

Come and experience the effects of money on our behaviour and society in general in a playful way. Pension Plan is a simple game that will let you feel what money does with you. After the gam,e we will join in a conversation about the experience and the theoretical background of how money works today and how it could work tomorrow

Colonialism and Oppression

by Sjors Beenkers

Sjors is a passionate activist and advocate for justice in the occupied territory of Western Sahara. He has visited the region and served as an international observer in the Military Tribunal in 2013. He will facilitate a discussion based on a short film, about the possibility of ceasefire and justice in the region.

War, Climate and Refugees

by Helge Ratzer from Peace Center Aarhus

The Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law currently monitors more than 110 armed conflicts around the world. These wars and the climate crisis have created the largest flow of internal and external refugees ever. At the same time, war affects global warming.

Challenging the West: BRICS

by Justinas Volungevicius

In this workshop, I will give a brief introduction about BRICS, which is an intergovernmental organizations consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa that have an aim to promote peace, security, development and cooperation through economic collaboration. From a Western perspective, BRICS is seen to be a rival to the current countries in power (G7) and a threat to US America’s wish for global order.

This might be the reason why we know so little about this relatively new collaboration. As educators, we should be aware of and curious of what is happening beyond the Western narrative media coverage to understand what is happening in our countries, in Europe and the World at large – to get a better understanding of what direction we need to go in, to secure a more peaceful and better world.

More Workshops to come…