The speakers
Meet our workshop leaders, keynote, pannelists, and other facilitators
Roberta Metsola
president of the European Parliament
Name
Documentary Maker
Jon Alexander
Keynote Speaker
Jon is the author of CITIZENS: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us and co-host of the How To Save Democracy podcast. He is a strategist, storyteller and connector whose work is devoted to opening the way to a “Citizen Future”: one rooted in the deep truth that all of us are smarter than any of us. Jon began his career with a decade in the advertising industry, winning the prestigious Big Creative Idea of the Year, before making a dramatic change. Driven by a deep need to understand the impact on society of 3,000 commercial messages a day, he gathered three Masters degrees, exploring “Consumer-ism” and its alternatives from every angle. His resulting book CITIZENS was listed by McKinsey as one of its Top 5 Recommended Reads in its Summer Reading Guide 2022, described as "an underground hit" in the Financial Times, and selected by the World Economic Forum for its CEO Book Club. Jon is also a Visiting Fellow on the Reimagining Democracy programme at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and sits on the advisory councils of DemocracyNext, the Democracy and Culture Foundation, and the Better Politics Foundation.
A Citizen Future is still possible
Authentic hope requires the clarity to see the troubles of the world as they are, the imagination to see that things could be different - and action. In the opening keynote of the conference, Jon will draw on lessons from history to argue that we are in a profound moment. The foundational "Consumer Story" has increasingly shaped the world over the last 80 years, and is now in collapse. It threatens to take humanity down with it: we face very real existential threat. But there is also an older, deeper, and more hopeful story emerging again: the Citizen Story. Jon will share stories from around the world, and invite us all to claim our agency to step into this story, and help make this future as we do so.
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Cristina Roldão
Cristina Roldao is a sociologist and one of Portugal’s foremost voices on race and education. Her research has traced how colonial hierarchies are mirrored in the postcolonial school system, where vocational tracks often absorb racialised students while elite high schools and universities remain disproportionately white. Her work challenges educators to see how educational segregation is not an accident, but a continuation of material and symbolic colonial divisions.
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Valentina Migliarini
Valentina Migliarini (UK) researches howrace and disability interact in school environments to produce forms of “cultural segregation” that remain invisible in policy and pedagogy. By situating race and disability together, she helps us reimagine inclusion not as assimilation, but as the transformation of educational norms themselves.
Workshop Leaders
Historiana Teaching and Learning Team
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Bridget Martin
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Ute Ackermann Boeros
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Gijs van Gaans
Time to Think
