Karoline Waack holds a Bachelor’s degree in European Studies from the University of Maastricht and a Master’s degree in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Oxford. She has experience of the Russian and Russo-German business world. She has also pursued studies and voluntary opportunities to explore migration issues within Russia, Kazakhstan and Germany.

Most recently, Karoline coordinated refugee work in the clerical district of Wittstock-Ruppin in North Brandenburg. Here, she became active in promoting democratic values and challenging racial and nationalist prejudice. She joined two associations which draw attention to racial and nationalist assaults in their direct surroundings and foster dialogue among different parties with the aim of overcoming prejudice. Results of her regional networking included demonstrations for immigrant rights and expert panels on asylum-related topics.

Karoline founded and co-founded programmes facilitating contact between local people and immigrants in day-to-day activities. She also led an inter-religious dialogue among adults and conducted workshops on global justice and migration in school classes and youth groups.

Today, Karoline works for the German Green Party and for MP Annalena Baerbock. At Social Science Works, she designs elements of our workshop and serves as a translator for our programmes among Chechen nationals.

Karoline enjoys sports, especially swimming and dancing. She also likes to play the trumpet.

Abdulrahman is a Master student of Cultural Science at the FU Berlin, studying the intellectual encounters among the three religions in the medieval Islamic world. He holds a Bachelor degree in Economics/Business Administration from Aleppo University in Syria, which he insisted to finish during the most dangerous phase of the Syrian war.

Abdulrahman started his social involvement at the age of 17 as a volunteer at Albirr association in Homs- Syria. As the Syrian crisis started, he became a Junior-Trainer of Life Skills program certified by UNICEF. In addition to that he volunteered at the Syrian Red Crescent as a health promoter and joined the Syrian Network for Building Peace.

Later on, he moved to Lebanon where he worked with different NGOs in the fields of education and relief, and finally joined a United Nation agency (UNRWA) as a social mobilizer working with the Palestinian refugee communities.

Finally, at 2016, he moved to Berlin to pursue his postgraduate studies. Abdulrahman is also interested in arts; he paints, makes photos, videos, does some voice acting, and used to sing in the Berlin State Opera’s choir. When he has free time left he enjoys cooking and eating.

Asaf is a PhD candidate at the iDTR (Institute for Dark Tourism Research) at the University of Central Lancashire. Focusing on the large yet under-researched dark tourism segment in Berlin, his research is concerned with tour guides’ interpretation, in their role as mediators or ‘Ambassadors of the City’ (Botschafter der Stadt).

Prior to moving to Berlin, Asaf graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Ecotourism from the University of Central Lancashire. In his final thesis, he compared the roles and responsibilities of private and NGO ecotourism stakeholders in Ethiopia. In Berlin’s Humboldt University’s Agriculture and Horticulture Faculty, Asaf completed a master degree in Integrated Natural Resource Management (environmental economics). For his master thesis, as part of the LILAC project (Living Landscapes China), he researched socio-environmental coevolution within the team’s focus on adoption of agricultural innovations in the Nabanhe Nature Reserve, China.

His choice of research topics, as well as his interest in Social Science Works, derives from his wish to find the balance between adding to scientific knowledge, and making that knowledge useful, accessible, and common outside the academic circles.

Christina Pao is an undergraduate at Yale University, currently pursuing an Intensive B.A. in Classics (Ancient Greek and Latin) and petitioning a joint B.A./M.A. in Political Science. Her primary research surrounds attitudinal change towards refugees and strategies of prejudice-reduction in the U.S., Germany, and Japan through the framework of Contact Theory. She has recently been expanding this research to encompass the study of volunteer culture, youth activism, and community-based integration.

Outside of academia, Christina has worked for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) as a youth summer school co-lead, the Integrated and Refugee Immigrant Services (IRIS) as a subsidized housing caseworker, and in the office of U.S. Senator Patty Murray as an immigration caseworker. She believes strongly in the practical power of academic theory and hopes to continue uniting her work in direct service to her research.

Sergiu Lucaci is a PhD fellow in political science at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. Upon receiving his BA degree from Jacobs University Bremen, he has pursued master studies at Cardiff University and Humboldt University Berlin. With a general interest in social and political theory, Sergiu is currently researching particular forms of civil society activity in the European Union in the aftermath of the financial crisis. His focus is on networks of non-governmental organizations that try to attain the status of legitimate contributors to the field of financial regulation. From a theoretical angle emphasizing the role of knowledge production, he seeks to uncover how civil society advocacy in a technical policy field is structured by the EU politico-administrative order through its various uses of outside expertise.

Alexandra is currently in her third year at the University of Copenhagen, studying political science. In the Autumn of 2017, she has been on exchange in Birmingham, UK. In the winter of 2017 she was a very appreciated intern at Social Science Works. Before Copenhagen, she spent a year studying political science at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA in the US. In the States, Alexandra became increasingly interested in social inequality. This stay also peaked her interest in international politics in general, but mostly regarding war and military interventions, as well as the immigration it creates. The impact these international forces have on democracy within states and the EU, is thus something she finds urgently relevant to study today. Altogether, the interconnectedness of war, inequality, and democracy is why she studies political science.

Sarah Coughlan is co-founder of Social Science Works. She earned her MA at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2014 where her thesis looked at educational inequality and the policy discourse that surrounds the debate. During her MA she worked on issues relating to housing and social policy as well as the question of ‘usable knowledge’ and the role of social science in the wider world. Before coming to the HU in 2012, she studied European Social and Political Studies at University College London where she specialized political philosophy and Italian, and spent a year studying in Rome. Her primary interests at Social Science Works are education, housing and social issues and the misuse of research that empowers poor policy, particularly in her native Britain; she is interested above all else in inequality in all its forms. Her motivation in joining Social Science Works stems from frustration in the academy’s inability to make any meaningful inroads into society’s biggest issues and resistance to anything that attempts to go beyond incremental change.

Daniel Meehan is a researcher and impact consultant with special interests in civil society, big data, migration and collective impact. After studying Anthropology and Social Sciences in London, Ankara, Berlin and Istanbul he has worked for the last four years in Berlin with a wide variety of organisations, developing impact strategies, running evaluations and impact measurement, and carrying out social innovation projects for, amongst others, the Berliner Senat, the GIZ, the European Commission, UNOSDP and UN Women. He has taught impact oriented project design at the Free University of Berlin, the Alice Salomon University of Social Work and the Washington University of St Louis. Currently he is developing new tools to simplify impact measurement for civil society organisations and increase capacity for production and analysis of socially relevant data.

Christian Kipp currently studies social science in the master’s program at Humboldt University Berlin. Recently, he spent a year in New York City as a visiting student at the New School for Social Research. Having previously studied economics, he completed his bachelor’s degree in social science at HU Berlin in 2014. In his bachelor’s thesis he compared the theoretical depictions of markets and individuals in economics and sociology. In his opinion, a unified social science, joining sociology and economics, is necessary in order to analyze market economies as social systems. Besides the social sciences, Christian is interested in mathematics and analytic philosophy.

Christian’s approach to social science is based on the conviction that scientific analysis of social mechanisms is a necessary condition for progressive social change based on reason and open discussion. He is discontent with the prevalence of various forms of obscurantism in the social sciences: whereas mathematical obscurantism tries to conceal theoretical poverty under a veneer of seemingly sophisticated, but pointless mathematical mumbo-jumbo, classical “soft” obscurantism deceives the reader by means of vague and confusing language. What the social sciences need is less pretentiousness and more clarity, not only to foster their internal communication, but also to gain impact outside of academia.

Michael Häfelinger is economist, sociologist, and health care researcher.  He works as a business consultant (www.unternehmercoaches.de) and is the Managing Director of the Berlin Institute for public health (www.biph.de).

His academic heart beats for equal opportunities. At TOPOS city research he was jointly responsible for the determination of rent ceilings in redevelopment and environmental protection areas. He also developed the set of indicators for the social report of the State of Brandenburg. Later he worked at the Robert-Koch-Institute on the poverty and wealth report of the Federal Government and co-designed the federal health survey.

These predominantly analytical level he left with entering the Berlin Institute for Public Health. Here he devotes himself to the implementation of health promotion measures in the workplace and city neighborhoods. As a management consultant for cooperation, he is specialized in participation and esteeming communication in corporations.

Ivan Capriles is a doctoral candidate in political science at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, researching on autonomy and control dynamics between oil exporting states and national oil industries. He holds an International Baccalaureate from the United World College of Hong Kong, China, a B.A. in International Relations from Lancaster University and a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany.

Energy politics is an area of focus for which he has pursued experiences such as an internship at the Venezuelan embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, work at the Venezuelan petroleum ministry´s unit of international affairs and technical training on crude processing in central Venezuela. Other experiences include post-tsunami housing reconstruction (World Bank, Banda Aceh, Indonesia), fragile states (Center for International Governance Innovation, Waterloo, Canada) and strategic planning (Venezuelan Embassy, Berlin, Germany).

Between 2015 and 2016 he was a research fellow on International Rule of Law and Justice Sector Reform at the Robert Bosch Academy. He was the rapporteur of the 2015 Salzburg Global Seminar 3^rd Global LGTB Forum on Human Rights and Social Cohesion. He presented a paper on coup d’états at the LASA Conference 2013 (Washington DC, USA) and wrote articles on Latin America´s megacities for Schlosssplatz 3 and on Venezuelan politics for Matices: Zeitschrift zu Lateinamerika, Spanien und Portugal. Other areas of interest and engagement include scenarios analysis and digitalization. He is collaborating with the grassroots policy thintank Polis180 on a project on Middle eastern scenarios. As a hobby, he has participated as extra music videos for the bands Tubbe and The Hidden Cameras, cast member for the short film Gold by German director Kai Stänicke and has co-authored the electronic single “Frau Böse” with German artist Trummerschlunk released by the Audiolith label.

Dr. Sergiu Buscaneanu is a visiting researcher at the Institute for European Integration, University of Hamburg, where he works on a book concerned with the dynamics of political regimes in the Eastern neighborhood of the EU. The book, which is due to be published in 2016 with Palgrave Macmillan, argues that the EU’s democratization role in Eastern neighborhood was weak over the period 1991-2014, but where such a weak role was present, it was only under four domestic and transnational conditions: (a) a higher cost-benefit balance of norm adoption; (b) a lower structural difficulty (e.g. effects of oil rents) a given country would need to overcome on its way towards democratization; (c) increased levels of power dispersion and political representation; and (d) a higher extent of democratic diffusion resulting from regional interactions.

Sergiu’s research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics with international relations. His primary areas of academic interest are EU external governance, democratization, regime dynamics, democratic diffusion, democratic theory, former Soviet Union, European Neighborhood Policy, Eastern Partnership and prospect theory, while the secondary ones include EU enlargement, fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis and concept building.

Sergiu Buscaneanu joined Social Science Works, because he is concerned with how actually social science works. He has completed an MA (2006) in EU politics at the University of Leeds and a PhD (2014) in political science at the BGSS, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Sergiu serves as a country expert for the “V-Dem” project and has been a Chevening, EMECW and DAAD scholar.

Lily Cichanowicz is currently doing her MA at Freie Universität Berlin where her research focuses on trajectories of capitalism, modern regimes, and emergent social movements. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 2015 where she studied Development Sociology with a concentration in Inequality studies. She has spent time living, working, and studying in numerous countries across Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, experiences which also inform her approach and contributions to projects at Social Science Works.

Martin Neise is an MA student of political science at the Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main. He holds a BA in North American Studies from the John-F.-Kennedy-Institute at the Free University Berlin and spent his exchange year at Reed College in Portland (OR). During his studies, he focused on the US welfare state and revitalization strategies of labor unions. Furthermore, Martin took a keen interest in political philosophy and normative questions about the legitimacy of power and domination.

After starting his Master’s program, Martin became involved with issues in political economy which compelled him to study abroad at the Central European University in Budapest. He focuses on heterodox macro-economics, crises of capitalism and EU integration and the political economy of development. Currently, he writes his Master’s thesis on global production networks and their interactions with financialization processes.

Martin is convinced that social science has the responsibility to feed and give back to its object of research and Social Science Works seems to be the place where that is possible.

Bérengère Gouraud has developed an affection for research thanks to her French-German curricula: After a Summa Cum Laude BA on the French-German campus from Sciences Po Paris, Bérengère studied law philosophy in Vienna during an exchange year. In the Masters in Public Affairs at Sciences Po, she has experienced having teachers from the administration that gave her a practical perspective on public policies. Both her research inclination and the proximity with the executive power pushed her to take part to Social Science Works.

To broaden her horizons before finishing her masters, she is taking part to the IPS programme in Berlin, which consists of being a student at the Humboldt University and a parliamentary assistant at the Bundestag. She has chosen to study philosophy to gain new, more distanced insights on society, and wish to concretely live in the political sphere as parliamentary assistant. There, on top of approaching the German political system, she will also be able to observe how information and minds are built up. Indeed, group dynamics and education are core interests of her that she has been developing throughout her engagement within the European Youth Parliament. Its sessions develop skills for discussions’ leading, creativity and individual empowerment. She is now willing to explore these elements within other contexts, such as school classes, enterprises and state’s services.

Niklas Kossow is a political scientist with a focus on anti-corruption policies and the use of new technologies in mobilizing anti-corruption movements. He holds a BA in European Social and Political Studies from University College London and a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin. Having worked as a Mercator Fellow on International Affairs, he recently returned to the Hertie School to work on his PhD thesis. Additionally, Niklas is the Communications Officer of the EU FP7 ANTICORRP Project at the European Research Center for Anti-Corruption and State Building. Previously he gained work experience at the German Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, the German Foreign Office and the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB). He previously worked as a researcher for Transparency International, Freedom House, the United Nations Development Programme and the World Wide Web Foundation. His experience as a researcher led him to support high quality and honest research aimed at improving public policy. Adding to his keen interest in anti-corruption work he loves to travel and has a strong affection for Eastern Europe and the Post-Soviet sphere. He regularly shares his thoughts on twitter @niklaskossow.

Johannes Kuhnert is an MA student in Political Theory at Goethe University Frankfurt Main. He has previously studied European Social and Political Studies at University College London and has been an exchange student at the University of Bologna and the New School for Social Research in New York. Currently, he is on the way to finishing his thesis on The Moral Economy of Financial Consultancy. During his studies, his interest progressively moved from political and social philosophy towards qualitative social research. As a result of this, Johannes has adopted ‘praxeography’, conversation and discourse analysis as his preferred mode of research, but he remains equally preoccupied with the conceptual foundations of sociology. Systems theory and Science and Technology Studies are his major reference points for the integration of his empirical and conceptual interests. He believes that radical constructivist stories can spur reflexivity in complex, knowledge-based societies in much the same way that modern philosophy used to in the past. He is glad to join Social Science Works to discuss his ideas with like-minded.

Oktay Tuncer is a master student Social Sciences at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. Oktay completed his Undergraduate degree in the same field studying both in Berlin and in Paris. At Humboldt University he received a far-reaching education in quantitative and qualitative research methods. At the Nanterre University of Paris he acquired important theoretical insights in sub fields of sociology like socio-anthropology, political sociology and sociology of economic thinking.

Oktay gained supplementary experience in academia by working as a student assistent in research institutes such as the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW, Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung) and the Berlin Social Science Research Center (WZB, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung).

In his studies, he focused on political and economic sociology, the sociology of inequality and research methods. The topic of his Bachelor thesis was the notion of nationality and citizenship in Turkey. For this he analyzed the ongoing debate on a new constitution.
Throughout his experiences in academia, Oktay faced the problems and obstacles of relevant, valuable and legitimate empirical research. This motivated him to become an associate of Social Science Works.

Johannes Petry is a political economist currently working on finance. He did his BA in Political Science and Economics at Goethe University Frankfurt, starting to integrate his knowledge from both disciplines. In order to further this interdisciplinary approach, he did an MA in International Political Economy at the University of Warwick and an MA Politics & Public Administration at the University of Konstanz.

Throughout his studies, he specialised in issues of political economy. Empirically, on the critical analysis of finance, crises and emerging markets in the context of a global economy. Theoretically, by combining different schools of research to overcome disciplinary boundaries and further an integrated approach to the study of society, politics and the economy. During and after his studies he worked as a teaching and research assistant at various universities and did an internship at the Institut für Sozialforschung.

During the research for his dissertation on varieties of financialisation he conducted a series of interviews with financial market actors and hereby realised how different the views from regulators and bankers are from academics, and how little some academics seem to understand finance and hence are unable to substantially criticise it. To avoid this fallacy, he decided to work in finance for two years before going back to academia. He is now doing a PhD at the University of Warwick, analysing the transformation of Chinese capital markets, incorporating his experiences as a financial analyst and political economist.

Johannes is worried about the current state of social science research which is mainly driven by methodological and theoretical debates and constrained by disciplinary boundaries. He believes that three aspects are of vital importance for good social science research: it should be empirically grounded and methodologically sound; it should be interdisciplinary as well as critical; and its results should be relevant for society. Because of this he is glad to be part of Social Science Works.

Paula Herrera is a Public Policy candidate at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. She is convinced that civil society and its think tanks are key players in the formation of fair, creative and active societies. Connected to this, policy-making must be developed hand-in-glove with a profound reflection on the means of achieving efficient results.

Before arriving to Germany in 2015, Paula worked at the Trade Commission of France in Mexico as an intern for Aeronautical and Security issues, where she helped to facilitate personalized market studies to the French private sector. Previously, Paula worked in different prominent non-governmental institutions; namely at the Colegio de México as a fellow researcher, and at OXFAM LAC, as an assistant of both HR and Business Management departments. Moreover, she has collaborated with the Centro de Estudios Espinosa Yglesias, which is a Mexican non-profit civil association, whose mission is to enrich political debate with policy advice and shed light on governmental decision-processes. Furthermore, in her spare time Paula is an active supporter of the LGBT minority’s organizations.

She holds a BA in Political Science from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (2009-2012), where she graduated with special honours after presenting a thesis that analyses the relationship between the electoral reforms, the economical positions and the degree of democracy of the different Venezuelan regimes. During her BA, Paula travelled to France for an exchange semester at Science Po Strasbourg, where she took several courses related to European Institutions and their contemporary challenges. Thanks to her multicultural upbringing, she is at home in the English, French and Spanish language and culture. Nowadays, she is learning German.

Ilyas Saliba is a research fellow at the Research Unit on Democracy and Democratization at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and a PhD candidate at the Berlin Graduate School for Social Sciences (BGSS) at Humboldt University Berlin. He holds a BA from the University of Hamburg in political Science and a MA in Comparative and international Studies from the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and University of Zurich.

Ilyas’ research lies at the intersection of comparative politics, international relations and regional studies on Middle Eastern politics & societies. He is working on a topic from a comparative political science angle but building on and communicating to other disciplinary fields. The problems he encounters as a consequence of this has motivated him to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions and paradigms that dominate the social sciences.

In his dissertation he explores political decision making and strategies of incumbent regimes and governments during times of public contestation in Morocco and Egypt.

Patrick Sullivan is a 2018 Master of Public Policy candidate at the  Hertie School of Governance. Originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the United States, he has Bachelor’s degrees in Economics, Secondary Education, Political Science and History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and participated in an exchange semester at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy during his time as an undergraduate. He credits his time abroad for making him a more empathetic, curious, and worldly person. Following his Bachelor’s, he taught courses in Economics, Government, and History –and coached American Football and Golf- in the Shorewood School District in Milwaukee. The areas of study that he is particularly passionate about include wealth and income inequality, behavioral economics, and American politics. Patrick was an intern at Social Science Works in 2017.

Sylvia Joss holds an M.A. in cultural studies. She is passionate about languages and cultures as well as practical questions in the field of migration and integration. Of special interest to her are inclusion, participation, anti-discrimination and anti-racism. Sylvia obtained her Bachelor´s degree in social anthropology and psychology from the University of Bern and successfully finished a Master’s program in cultural studies at Sabanci University in Istanbul. She has been working in Germany and Switzerland in projects on labor market integration, anti-discrimination and participation.

Alper Baysan is a political scientist interested in European politics, human rights and democracy. He is personally invested in knowledge transfer between science and society. Alper holds a Bachelor’s in Political Science from the University of Bielefeld, a Master’s from Sabanci University Istanbul, and a second Master’s degree in international studies from ETH Zurich. Alper currently works as a research associate at the German Institute for Human Rights. He also edits and translates texts as a freelancer (www.baysan.eu). Previously, Alper worked as a research associate with the Berlin Institute for Population and Development and project lead with the Consumer Protection Organization Berlin. You can follow Alper on Twitter where he tweets on societal issues (@alboom1).