Ella Whelan is the co-convenor of the 2021 Battle of Ideas festival. She is a journalist and author of What Women Want: Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism. Ella is a columnist for spiked and one third of the weekly spiked podcast.

Ella regularly appears on TV and radio, including Question Time, Today, Times Radio, Sky News, GMB, GB News, Any Questions, Moral Maze, Politics Live, Channel 4 and others. She has written for The Critic, New Statesman, Telegraph, Sunday Times, The Economist, the Irish Times, the Sun, Conscience, Spectator, City Am, IBT, Grazia, Standpoint and others.

Ella is one half of Lobster Films – a new production company making political documentaries about thorny issues that others shy away from.

François E. Clerc is of the project partners of the Swiss Employers’ Association’s April 2015 report on „Women on Boards – 400 proposals for Swiss companies“ or in German „Frauen im Verwaltungsrat – 400 Vorschläge für Schweizer Gesellschaften“.

Before founding AdValorem Partners, a leadership advisory boutique, François E. Clerc was a Senior Partner at the world largest privately owned executive search firm. Based in Geneva, he worked at local, national and European level for a wide range of clients ranging from Swiss privately owned companies to Fortune 500 multinationals. Prior to his consulting years, he was managing director of a Swiss company active in the Asia Pacific region, based in Hong Kong. François started his career at HP Europe and spent 15 years in the technology field. Since 2000, he is an active promoter of Advisory Boards and Boards‘ governance. He is the producer of a radio show called „Executive Life“ that hosted senior leaders to talk about the ingredients of their success and the lessons learned from their failure. Lastly, he is the founder of the Presidents Club, an informal advisory board active in the Lemanic region gathering CEOs and Presidents from the international local community.

Recently, François also co-founded Triple A Associés a company that offers workshops in corporate governance in Switzerland. He is also the CEO of a medical group, of which he used to be an advisor to the board.

Frank Furedi, author of more than 25 books and social commentator is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent. His research has been oriented towards the way that risk and uncertainty is managed by contemporary culture. His two books, The Culture of Fear and Paranoid Parenting, investigated the interaction between risk consciousness and perceptions of fear, trust relations and social capital in contemporary society. How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century (2018) explored the distinct features of contemporary fear culture. He has published widely about controversies relating to issues such as health, parenting children, food and new technology.

The Wall Street Journal calls Gerd ‘one of the leading Media Futurists in the World’. Co-author of the influential book The Future of Music (2005, Berklee Press), author of Music2.0 (2008), The End of Control (2007) and The Future of Content (2011), Gerd’s background is in music; in 1985 he won the Quincy Jones Award and subsequently graduated from Boston’s Berklee College of Music (1987). Since 2002, following a decade as digital media entrepreneur and start-up CEO, Gerd speaks at conferences and seminars around the globe on the Future of Media, Content, Technology, Business, Advertising, Telecom, Communications and Culture. Since 2011, Gerd’s area of expertise also includes important “green” topics.

Gerd’s keynotes, presentations and think-tanks are renowned for his hard-hitting and provocative yet inspiring, motivational style. With engagements in 43 countries since 2003, Gerd has addressed over 150,000 professionals, and is considered a key influencer.

His diverse client list includes Nokia, Google, Sony-BMG, Telkom Indonesia, Siemens, Kuoni, RTL, ITV, the BBC, France Telecom/Orange, Deutsche Telekom, The Financial Times, DDB, Omnicom, the European Commission, Nokia Siemens Networks and many others. Gerd is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (London). He resides in Basel, Switzerland.

Guido D’Amico is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CERN’s Theoretical Physics Department. His core fields of Interest are Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Gravity, Quantum Field Theory, String Theory.

Guy Stevens has worked in the entertainment industry in touring, events and production, as an entrepreneur, and occasional performer his entire life. He created the first regular English-speaking comedy club circuit in a non-native English-speaking nation: Switzerland. Since then English language comedy nights have grown across Europe. And in a new twist to internationalism, Stevens now presents regular French-comedy club nights for London’s francophone audience. He is also developing Swiss comedians in their quest to conquer the English-speaking world. Coincidentally, he also revolutionised pet couture in the Swiss retail market (today pampering Swiss pets with luxury goods is all the rage).

Harald Taglinger, born in 1965 in Kaufbeuren, Germany, has written about the internet and IT since 1992. He has been working at Microsoft and Citrix for two decades, and he also writes in Telepolis, a leading German online magazine published by Heinz Heise Verlag.

Isabel Garcia is a Swiss and Spanish national born 1963 in Madrid. She has a Master Degree in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin.  Her professional career includes working as a lobbyist and/or communications expert for various NGOs representing employers and environmental organisations, as well as a project manager in international organisations and the national, cantonal and communal administrations. Since 2010 she’s been a Member of the City Parliament of Zurich for the Greenliberal Party. Since 2014, Isabel has been president of Secondas Zurich, a non-partisan thinktank for migration policy and citizenship issues.

Jacob Geuder is currently working on his PhD about videoactivism in Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town, in which he is examining the intersection of online video production and the right to the city. Looking at videos of street protests and police violence in both cities, the goal is to capture how social media insert themselves into specific urban spaces. How do the ‘streets’ and the ‘net’ merge into each other to produce a new amalgam of public spheres?

Having worked at the Centre for African Studies, Geuder taught courses such as African Digital Revolution or Digital Revolution in Africa? at the University of Basel. Previous to his PhD, he did research with the local artists collective KaYelema in Bamako and has been since long interested in perspectives emerging in the Global South. In his activities he moves between academic research, public art and activism.