WHAT'S ON
Full List
CULTIVATING PEACE FROM WITHIN
Building the Human Capacities for a More Cohesive Europe
Peace Forum Launch / Tue 22nd Sept / 5-7 pm
*Hosted event
For registrations: Register here
*Google form is hosted on another website
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The Brussels Peace Salon is a new convening platform for intercultural dialogue exploring how holistic education, healing, ecology, leadership, and community practice contribute to lasting peace. In addition to keynote presentations, the event will incorporate small-group workshops and experiential exercises.
The platform will also serve as a space for networking and relationship-building among peace-building allies in a convivial setting.
*Hosted events are events we are happy to support, but are not responsible for the content.
THE SOCIAL BRAIN, USE IT OR LOSE IT A Salon with Sarah Stein Lubrano
Salon / Ideas | Tues 22 Sept | 6.30-8.30pm
*Doors open at 6.30pm. The speaker will start at 7pm.
Not a Member yet? Join Full Circle now & come to events at the Members' rate!
Have you noticed yourself preferring to stay in more? Trusting people a little less? Finding small talk a little harder? You might not be imagining it — your brain might actually be changing shape.
Researcher Sarah Stein Lubrano calls it social atrophy: the quiet shrinking of our social brains as we withdraw from each other. The more time we spend alone behind screens, the harder social cues become to read, the more suspicion creeps in, and the more we convince ourselves — "I prefer to be alone," "people can't be trusted" — that isolation was our choice all along. It's a vicious cycle, and in a world growing more transactional and distrustful by the day, we may all be caught in it without realizing.
But Lubrano isn't here just to diagnose the problem, but to show us the way out. Because the brain that atrophies can also be retrained. Join Sarah as she unpacks the data, debunks the myths, and makes the case that regular, genuine social contact isn't a nice-to-have. It's the foundation of a shared life and the only place from which we can actually begin to fix things together.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Sarah Stein Lubrano is a researcher, author and broadcaster. Her academic research has focused on the role of emotion in political communication, and specifically cognitive dissonance. Lubrano is the head of research for the Future Narratives Lab. For many years she was the head of content at The School of Life, where she is still a content lead. She writes and speaks publicly on a variety of topics. In earlier lives, Lubrano made films and worked as a prison tutor and obituary writer.
GOOD READS
Don't Talk About Politics, How to Change 21st Century Minds (2025);
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ADDITIONAL INFO
ACCESS
Bar & snacks
Double workshop:
Narrative Mapping for Political Strategy & Creative Storytelling in the Attention Age
Future Narratives Lab: Sarah Stein Lubrano & Dan Stanley
WORK | Wed 23rd Sept | 10am-1pm & 2pm-5pm
For professionals in political & communications strategy Places are limited. Book for 1 or both sessions.
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Narrative Mapping for Political Strategy (morning)
In order to challenge harmful political ideas and systems, from carbon emitting industries to increasingly authoritarian governments, it’s crucial to shift public understanding and common sense. And to do that, NGOs, governmental bodies, and others need to first understand why prevailing narratives maintain their power and appeal. Only then does it become possible to strategically select and design interventions (from media-led campaigns to embedded community practices) that will be sufficiently powerful and appealing to change the political landscape for good.
In this session, we’ll share our expertise about how best to do this, building on years of experience working with coalitions and progressive institutions across the world. Together, we’ll map dominant societal narratives that keep our imagination and action trapped in a limited spectrum of possibilities, and tracing the institutions, practices, and policies that make narratives powerful.
In this workshop, we will:
Creative Storytelling in the Attention Age (afternoon)
In this session, we’ll sharpen our storytelling skills, with the help of tools and frameworks that can guide and inspire us. And we’ll consider how to make the age-old power of a story work in the age of fragmented political soundbites and the shortest of short-form video.
We will:
PARTICIPANTS
The workshops Narrative Mapping for Political Strategy and Creative Storytelling in the Attention Age are for all professionals working towards reframing a key social issue, or want to communicate more strategically or creatively about an important problem, on or offline.
If you are working in a governmental or nongovernmental organisation that is struggling to cut through the noise on a particular topic, this is designed with you in mind.
ABOUT THE HOSTS
Future Narratives Lab is a democratically owned and controlled non-profit that exists to build the independent cultural and political power of civil society. Based in London, their team works across Europe and beyond, typically through partnerships with groups working on entrenched and complex social challenges. Future Narrative Lab equips campaigners, coalitions and communities with narrative as a tool for building their collective power.
Dan Stanley is Executive Director at non-profit research body the Future Narratives Lab, and Strategy Director at economic development co-operative Stir to Action. Daniel has worked with campaigns, coalitions, foundations and political parties in the UK and globally to develop strategies for broadening the appeal of alternative social and economic propositions, including seven years leading digital mobilisation agency Small Axe.
TICKETS
MEMBERS Sngle workshop (am or pm) €200 Double workshop (full day) €400
NON-MEMBERS Single workshop (am or pm) €225 Double workshop (full day) €400
INCLUSIVITY / DONATION RATE - waiting list. Any available places will be allocated to those on the waiting list before the event.
KEY LINKS
Future Narratives Lab
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FOOD & DRINK
Refreshments provided. Lunch available
Book Launch / Wed 23rd Sept / 6pm - 8pm
*Doors open at 5.30pm*
*Hosted event, en français
Les Juifs, les Arabes, ma famille et moi by Pierre Hazan is a deeply personal yet political narrative tracing two centuries of Jewish-Arab coexistence through the story of the author's own family.
Writing as a member of the last generation of Jews born in Arab lands, Hazan traces this history through four figures: his ancestor Moshe, a rabbi who journeyed from Jerusalem to Europe and back before siding with the Arab world against European colonial powers; his great-uncle Daoud, a revolutionary and co-founder of Egypt's first independence party who was sentenced to death by the British yet remained a Zionist; his maternal grandfather Maurice, whose Arab, Jewish, and British identities collided as the Middle East grew turbulent in the 1940s; and his father, Elie, who tried to delay an irreversible exile after the 1956 Suez Crisis, as Jews across the Arab world were uprooted following the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
Weaving family history with broader historical currents, the book is both an elegy for a largely vanished world of Jewish-Arab coexistence and a fragile note of hope that such coexistence might be reimagined.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pierre Hazan is the former Diplomatic Correspondent for Libération (Paris) and Le Temps (Geneva), specializing in humanitarian action and international justice, and has closely observed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the Middle East. A Fellow at Harvard Law School (2005) and the United States Institute of Peace (2006), he has authored several books, including Justice in a Time of War and Judging War, Judging History (Stanford University Press, 2010), and served as a U.N. expert on cultural rights in 2013.
A news commentary with
James Kanter & guests
Ideas / Wed 23rd Sept / 6.30-8.30pm
Live & On the Record: A Podcast with James Kanter
Europe’s news is loud and moving fast. Behind the News keeps up and cuts through the noise. Come join veteran Brussels journalist James Kanter and a stellar cast of journalists and reporters who break through the clutter and help make sense of it.
From EU power plays, to the stories that shaped the week and the ones that slipped past the front page, come hear what's really going on behind the headlines.
This is journalism doing what it's supposed to do: telling it as it is. Unfiltered and live in front of you. Join us and dig into the stories defining Europe right now.
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James Kanter is an American and British award-winning journalist and Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. Previously at Herald Tribune and The New York Times. He's co-founder and editor of the Podcast EU Scream.
Katrin Prybil is a senior correspondent at Reportrois, with previous experience in the UK and the Middle East. She's the Brussels-based EU correspondent for a pool of major regional German newspapers, covering EU affairs, NATO and current affairs in the Benelux countries.
Joanna Gill is a British journalist based in Brussels, whose work on TV and in print has featured on Reuters, AFP, Euronews, Channel 4 news, and others. She has spent 15 years reporting on the EU connecting policy to the people it impacts.
Raziye Akkoc is AFP's EU correspondent in Brussels, covering trade, tech and economics. Her career spans London, France and six years in Ankara reporting Turkish politics, where she co-founded Turkey recap newsletter. Previously she was at The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph.
CORPORATE POWER in the age of ai
Ideas / Salon | Thurs 24th Sept | 6.30-8.30 pm
Who really rules the world we live in? Not governments. Not voters. According to award-winning economist Cecilia Rikap, it's a small cluster of cloud hegemons (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) whose intellectual monopolies over knowledge, data and narratives now shape global capitalism itself.
Rikap reveals how even giants like Disney, McDonald's, Nike and Walmart depend on these tech rulers to extract value through AI and discipline their own workforces. States, too, are watching core functions slip from their hands. Innovation, in this telling, is not a free and neutral game - it's a hierarchy, and someone is always at the top of it.
To get there, Rikap went straight to the source: 112 interviews with people inside the world's largest firms, combined with hard data on venture capital, acquisitions, open source, AI conferences and patents - piecing together a vivid map of who holds power today and what's at stake.
However, this is not a story without an exit. Rikap's counterimage insists technology can still be developed by the people, for the people and the planet, through democratic planning rather than predatory concentration.
Come hear how we got here and how we might take the cloud back.
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Cecilia Rikap is an award winning economist and currently Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). She is also a researcher at the CONICET, Argentina's national research council and a researcher at University of Technology of Compiègne. Her research is rooted in the international political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. She currently studies the rising concentration of intangible assets leading to the emergence of intellectual monopolies, among others from digital and pharma industries, the distribution of intellectual rents, resulting geopolitical tensions and the effects of knowledge assetisation on the knowledge commons and development.
The Rulers, Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud (2026); Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered (2021); The Digital Innovation Race: Conceptualising the Emerging New World Order (2021).
We only have 120 tickets and we always sell out!!
It's time to dust off your dancing shoes and join a traditional Scottish ceilidh.
No previous experience or dancing skills required - the band will be calling out the steps as we go along. If you're a ceilidh regular then you know how much fun it is!
Bring your friends or come along but please, no spikey heels on our rather beautiful wooden floor.
* 7.30pm doors open - bar snacks available
* 8.00pm start dancing!
* 10.30pm Band finishes
*TICKET INCLUDES 1 DRINK (BEER, WINE OR SOFT)
BAR SNACKS AVAILABLE ALL EVENING
Bar & light food
The Hoggies are the original Brussels-based Scottish ceilidh band.
MEDIA NETWORK DRINKS For journalists, editors & creators
Social | Tues 29th Sept | 7-9pm
Co-hosted by Brussels Media Women Introductory Talk Julie Majerczak, Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
Join Brussels Media Women and Full Circle for a conversation with Julie Majerczak from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on the growing challenges to press freedom and the impact of disinformation on journalism in the EU and beyond.
As journalists and media professionals navigate increasing political pressure, online manipulation, and attacks on independent reporting, this event will explore how press freedom is being affected and what can be done to protect reliable, independent journalism.
It will also be an opportunity to meet others working in media, exchange experiences, and discuss the issues shaping our profession.
ABOUT:
Julie Majerczak is the Reporters Without Borders Representative to the European Institutions. She has represented the international press freedom NGO at the EU level since May 2016. Before joining RSF, Julie was a journalist for 16 years. She moved to Brussels in 2002 to report on EU affairs for the French daily newspaper Libération for which she worked for ten years. She also reported for the French daily newspaper Le Parisien, RTL radio and the online media outlets Contexte. Born in Paris, she has a Master in Law and is a graduate of Sciences Po Paris.
Brussels Media Women is a community for women working in media and journalism in Brussels. They organise informal drinks, events, and networking opportunities where members can meet, exchange experiences, and support each other.
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/42542036/
Open to all journalists editors & creators | Booking required
Bar open
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WAF CAFF
Ideas I Tues 6th Oct I 12.15-1.15 pm **OPEN TO ALL**
We meet for one hour on the first Tuesday of every month at Rond-Point Schuman, outside the European Commission, to stand up for democracy.
Each gathering focuses on a different issue, highlighting where rights and freedoms are at risk.
This is about freedom and about us as engaged citizens. Coffee and conversation are part of the gathering.
Democracy & coffee ☕
Join us and exercise your democratic rights.
No need to book, just drop by.
GEOPOLITICAL SHIFTS AT EUROPE'S EDGES
Salon / Ideas | Tues 6 Oct | 6.30-8.30pm
Long before Putin's invasion of Ukraine, conflict was simmering on Europe's borders. Why have Russian resorts sprung up on the coast of Northern Cyprus? What does Sarajevo's local politics reveal about the ambitions of Trump, Putin, and Erdoğan? these questions were already being written into the map, In overlooked territories in eastern Europe, the eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus, where local disputes spiral into regional crises, global alliances are forged and broken, and power is brokered while the West looks elsewhere.
It is in these overlooked borderlands that empires end, new conflicts begin, and where Europe's future may be decided.
From the Balkans to the Caucasus, Cyprus to Nagorno-Karabakh, acclaimed correspondent and Pulitzer grantee Hannah Lucinda Smith has spent years in Eurasia's grey zones, meeting the politicians, spies, and ordinary people caught where local disputes quietly become global reckonings.
Join us for an intimate conversation with one of the most incisive voices writing on the borderlands today. Hannah brings the sharp reportage we need to understand contemporary Europe and its unfinished frontiers.
Hannah Lucinda Smith is a journalist and author. As foreign correspondent she has been reporting for major global publications including The Economist, The Times of London, BBC and Monocle, From 2013 to 2025 she has been based in Turkey, reporting across the Middle East and Europe for The Times of London, The Atlantic, WIRED, and others. Before Hinterlands she has also authored Erdogan Rising, an account of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's rise to power, and Zarifa, the memoir of Afghan human rights activist Zarifa Ghafari.
Hinterlands: Journey's through Europe's edges (2026); Zarifa, A woman's battle in a man's world (2022); Erdogan Rising: The Battle for the Soul of Turkey (2019).
Fix the System or Replace it? Political Imagination in Action By Michael Damman & Maaike Berthoud Ideas / Action | Fri 9th Oct | 6.30 - 9.00 pm
Fix the System or Replace it? Political Imagination in Action
By Michael Damman & Maaike Berthoud
Ideas / Action | Fri 9th Oct | 6.30 - 9.00 pm
We feel stuck. Representative democracy is failing to meet the challenges of our era. Is reform possible or is something more radical required?
Come spend your Friday evening in our unconventional Democracy Escape Room to discover what ways-out are available to us today to get unstuck from the impasse. This is an immersive and entertaining session of vision-building and strategising to repair and reinvigorate our democracy. It also involves fun and games because democracy resets come with energised citizens.
With the guidance of two experienced facilitators, Michaël and Maaike, we'll expose structural flaws in our political system and propose democratic innovations to address them. We'll identify what's most urgent, question proposals and assess their merits, determining what it would take - legally, politically, strategically - to implement any of the solutions. Together, we'll construct a viable way out and a credible path to enact the solutions.
Expect real talk and honest debate about turning frustration into action. Expect to find community and gain an invigorated spirit. You'll leave with the tools to imagine what's next, and concrete ways for committed action.
DINNER OPTION AVAILABLE AFTER THE SESSION
Michaël Damman brings a rare combination of anthropological insight and hands-on organisational experience to the field of democratic innovation. Having spent many years working across the socio-cultural, educational, and psychosocial sectors, he has developed a deep, practice-based understanding of how groups think, decide, and act together. He is particularly drawn to questions of collective intelligence, citizen participation, and shared governance - not as abstract ideals, but as processes that can be designed, tested, and improved. At the Brussels Citizens' Assembly, he coordinates evaluations and designs interactive formats that give citizens real ownership of pluralist information. At Agora.brussels, he builds partnerships with associations advancing democratic renewal. He's also part of the Belgian democratic reform movement Démocratie XXL, advocating for expanding citizens' political rights through direct and deliberative democracy.
Maaike Berthoud boats an exceptional blend of theoretical insight and hands-on creative experience. As a theatre teacher and director with a background in participatory democracy, she embodies a unique approach to political engagement, bringing together academic rigor and the arts. Previously a political consultant at Dreamocracy, her talent for fostering collaboration and encouraging innovative thinking has helped to creatively integrate diverse perspectives in political contexts.
The Nights Are Quiet in Teheran by Shida Bazyar
Culture | Thurs 15th Oct | 7:00-8:30 pm
Monthly meet up to discuss a great read, along with drinks & good company.
*Doors open at 6.30pm. The book club begins at 7pm.
‘The pages … pulse with solidarities and betrayal, with heartache and humor.” ― the judges of The International Booker Prize 2026
Set across four decades, from 1979 to 2009, this is a polyphonic novel of one family’s flight from and return to Iran. It is about revolution, oppression, resistance, and the absolute desire for freedom.
1979. Behzad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah’s expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the courageous, intelligent Nahid.
1989. Nahid lives her new life in West Germany with Behzad. With their young children, they spend hour after hour in front of the radio, hoping for news from others who went into hiding after the mullahs came to power.
1999. Laleh returns to Iran with her mother, Nahid. Between beauty rituals and family secrets, she gets to know a Tehran that hardly matches her childhood memories.
2009. Laleh’s brother Mo is more concerned with a friend’s heartbreak than with student demonstrations in Germany. But then the Green Revolution breaks out in Iran and turns the world upside down.
Shida Bazyar studied writing in Germany, and worked in youth education for many years. Born in 1988, she is the author of the novels The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran and Sisters in Arms. The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran has won the Blogger Literary Award, Ulla Hahn Prize, and Uwe Johnson Prize. The English translation was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
Bar open with snacks
PIANO QUARTETS
Brussels Muzieque
Music / Sun 18 Oct / 7pm
Join Brussels Muzieque for an evening of Romantic piano-quartet masterpieces.
The ensemble brings together four artists of the Brussels chamber scene: Lithuanian pianist Monika Dars, laureate of the Joseph Darche Piano Prize and chamber-music teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Mons; Kazakh violinist Meruert Karmenova, a sought-after soloist across Europe and recently appointed concertmaster in Antwerp; Polish violist Monika Młynarczyk, co-principal viola of La Monnaie / De Munt; and cellist Eduardo Tonietto, founder and artistic director of Brussels Muzieque, active internationally as a chamber musician.
Their programme spans the early and high Romantic style: Gustav Mahler’s youthful Piano Quartet, already charged with symphonic imagination; the lyrical Andante from Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 60; and Robert Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 47, performed in full — a cornerstone of the repertoire, rich in dialogue and warmth
*Dinner available after the concert, please book in advance
ACCES
Bar & snacks & light food
Gypsy-Jazz: Django Chutney & Trio Qu'a Trois
Music / Thurs 22nd Oct / 8pm
*Doors & bar open 7pm. Concert starts at 8pm.
Back by popular demand, Brighton based gypsy-jazz trio Django Chutney are coming back to blow away our Full Circle audience — and this time they're sharing the stage with Trio Qu'a Trois, with the two bands taking it in turns throughout the night.
Their combination part vocal harmonies, huge repertoire that draws from so many eras and genres of the 20th century, virtuoso guitar show-offs, and ridiculous sense of fun and musical adventure has helped them secure fans in the jazz world and across the spectrum alike - all ages and all musical tasted will find something to enjoy in Django Chutney & Trio Qu'a Trois hugely entertaining and energetic performances.
Drawing from Chutney's repertoire, along with more modern tunes, 20's blues, and the very-possible chance of some Black Sabbath, Django Chutney steamroller the audience with a forceful jazz-guitar sound that amazes and delights in equal measure.
Trading sets across the evening, Trio Qu'a Trois bring their own distinct flavour to the Full Circle stage - a trio built around guitar, helicon, saxophone and banjo, blending gypsy-jazz swing with a playfully unconventional instrumentation that sets them apart.
THE BAND "Django Chutney"
Jed Cutler – Guitar & Vocals
Tom Bailey – Double Bass & Vocals
Ben Mack – Guitar & Vocals
THE BAND "Trio Qu'a Trois"
Gilles Kremer – Guitar & Helicon
Augustin Dive (Gus) – Saxophone
Philippe Quewet (Max) – Banjo & Double bass
Find them on:
WHEELCHAIR
Ideas I Tues 3rd Nov I 12.15 - 1.15pm **OPEN TO ALL**
Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran
Culture | Sat 14th Nov | 4 - 5:30 pm
NEW! A regular non-fiction book club focused on how individuals and communities navigate, survive, and resist unjust systems.
*Doors open at 3.30pm. The book club begins at 4pm.
‘the most urgent and necessary book of our times, for our times' ― Michael Morpurgo
Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish writer, political thinker and journalist. Her work appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine, La Stampa, Der Spiegel and Le Monde Diplomatique among other prominent international media outlets. During her twenty-year career as a journalist, and before she lost her job due to political oppression, she was twice recognized as Turkey’s most read political columnist. She has lived in Lebanon, Tunisia and France, and was a visiting fellow at St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. Her books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been published and translated in several countries. She is on the advisory board of Progressive International and Democracy Next.
In 2019, she published the internationally acclaimed nonfiction book How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, about the rise of right-wing populism and how it operates. In 2021-2023 she was a fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg, working on a project "A New Vocabulary for 21st Century Progressives. In 2023, she received the El Mundo International Journalism Awards in the Freedom of the Press category for her body of work. Temelkuran was longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction for Nation of Strangers.
She Who Remains by Rene Karabash
Culture | Thurs 19th Nov | 7:00-8:30 pm
High in the Accursed Mountains, in an Albanian village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, Bekja escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. Her decision sets off a brutal chain of events, destroying her family and separating her from the one she loves the most. Years later, as Bekija – now Matija – tells their story to a visiting journalist, long-buried truths come to light, along with the realisation of all that might have been.
She Who Remains - a dark and poetic novel about identity, gender, love, freedom, and societal norms - was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
Rene Karabash (born Irena Ivanova) is a Bulgarian poet, writer, screenwriter, actor and playwright. She has won multiple awards for her work, including several Best Actress awards for her role in the film Godless. Her debut novel, She Who Remains, was awarded the 2019 Elias Canetti Prize, Bulgaria’s most prestigious literary award. It has been translated into over a dozen languages, and a film, adapted by the author, is set to be released in 2026. The English language edition was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Karabash is also the author of the collection Omar’s Letters to His Future Wife, and is working on her second novel.
Join us for the launch of Connection Art Show
"Connection" is an exhibition about the threads that bind us to one another, to place, to memory, and to the world around us.
Creative expression unlocks and reveals a world of literal, abstract, personal, or political interpretations: Intimacy and relationship, community and belonging, ancestry and heritage, identity and the self, ecology and the body, technology and its paradox of closeness and distance...
Artists in this vernissage invite us to reflect on what it means to be truly connected, offering new ways of seeing, thinking and being through countless forms.
FREE ENTRY
Drinks available from our bar
You already know us, you know what we do, and that by coming YOU make this a great event!
Get your WEEKEND PASS today and treat yourself for the entire weekend!
Ideas Festival / Fri 20th Nov / 7 - 8:30 pm
*Hours might change*
What if the problem with climate conversations isn't that we're not scared enough — but that we're too scared to think clearly?
Melting glaciers. Ticking clocks. Apocalyptic headlines. We've been told fear is what moves people to act. Professor François Gemenne isn't buying it. One of the sharpest minds in environmental geopolitics, he argues that catastrophe-driven messaging doesn't spur action — it breeds fatalism, anxiety and division, and it's why the climate debate has stalled.
In this Salon, Gemenne makes the case for a different conversation entirely: one rooted in human agency, not helplessness. He'll explore what it actually takes to make a sustainable future feel attractive, achievable, and fair and he’ll connect the dots, showing why climate action can't be treated as an isolated "green issue" when it's entangled with everything from agriculture to social justice.
Come talk about the hard things without the polarization. A shared, desirable vision of the future starts with better dialogue, not louder alarm bells.
GET THE WEEKEND OR DAY PASS
François Gemenne is a specialist of environmental geopolitics and the governance of migration, as well as a FNRS senior research associate at the University of Liège, where he also directs the Hugo Observatory, and at the University of Versailles (CEARC). He also lectures on environmental and migration policies in various universities, including Sciences Po (Paris and Grenoble) and ULB in Brussels. He has worked in particular with populations displaced by environmental changes, including natural disasters, and the policies of adaptation to climate change. He has conducted field studies in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, Tuvalu, China, Kyrgyzstan, the Maldives, Mauritius and Japan, after the Fukushima disaster. In 2010, he was awarded the ISDT-Wernaers Prize for achievement in the communication of science to the general public.
Parler Du Climat Sans Plomber L’Atmosphère (2026) ; L'écologie n'est pas un consensus. Dépasser l'indignation (2022). Atlas De L'Anthropocène (2021), On A Tous Un Ami Noir (2020), Dis, C'Est Quoi L'Immigration?(2020), Géopolitique Du Climat (2015), Geopolitique Du Changement Climatique (2015).
Ideas Festival / Sat 21st Nov / 1.30 - 3 pm
The recent decision by the University of Chicago to ban AI, laptops and phones from its undergraduate Social Sciences Core is bold, but also somewhat expected. The way AI is changing our lives is the subject of much debate, fears and hopes, but when it comes to our brains and more in general our very ability to think and do so critically, we cannot but ask ourselves what the purpose of a university should be in the age of AI. Should universities teach students how to use their brains rather than simply how to use AI?
With the expert guidance of Critical AI maestro, Benedetta Brevini, we'll get to the thorny questions: what happens to writing, summarising, critical thinking, interpretation and independent research when machines can perform these tasks instantly? What about original thought? And most importantly, what would an education designed around these principles look like in practice? Join Benedetta as she connects the dots between tech, society and democracy. Make sense of it all and learn what you could do about it.
Dr Benedetta Brevini is an expert in Critical AI, the relationship between data capitalism, AI and the climate crisis and environmental communication. She is currently Research professor in platforms and society at KU Leuven, and Associate Professor of political economy of communication at the University of Sydney. Before joining academia she worked as a journalist in Milan, New York and London for CNBC, RAI and the Guardian and held tenured positions at City University London and Brunel University London. She writes on The Guardian’s Comment is Free and contributes to a number of print and web publications including South China Morning Post, OpenDemocracy and the Conversation. She is currently working on a new book project on Communication, Data Capitalism and the Climate Emergency.
Newscorp: Empire of Influence (2024); Is AI good for the Planet? (2021); Amazon, Understanding a Global Communication Giant (2020); Climate Change and the Media (2018); Carbon Capitalism and Communication: Confronting Climate Crisis (2017); Public Service Broadcasting Online (2013); Beyond Wikileaks (2013).
Ideas Festival / Sat 21st Nov / 5pm - 6.30pm
Somewhere beneath the Arctic ice, a communications cable goes dark - severed, deliberately, in the middle of the night. It's one small, chilling image from a much larger story: as the fastest-warming place on Earth thaws, distant lives that once had little reason to touch are being pulled into sudden, unavoidable proximity. What happens next?
Award-winning investigative journalist Kenneth R. Rosen, has spent his career documenting individuals and communities caught inside systems that are fraying, colliding, or failing around them. Today, his focus is the Arctic.
He traces how a warming Arctic is reshaping supply chains, security, and geopolitics far beyond the polar circle, forcing nations and communities into new, often fraught, forms of contact. Connection, in Kenneth's reporting, is forced, hostile, and destabilizing - the kind that happens when melting ice opens new shipping lanes, exposes untapped resources, and drags rival powers into the same contested space.
Join Kenneth as he discusses how a polar war might affect people, communities and their land.
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Kenneth R. Rosen is an award-winning narrative journalist and author. He narrative reporting from around the world focuses on how major geopolitical issues and conflict shape individual lives. He has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic, and reported from more than two dozen countries. Rosen was a 2025 Ira A. Lipman Fellow at Columbia University. He received the 2022 Kurt Schork Freelance Award for his reporting from Ukraine, Syria, and Malta. His earlier book Troubled prompted government inquiries into abuses at youth care facilities.
Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic (2026); Troubled: The Failed Promise of America's Behavioral Treatment Programs (2021); Bulletproof Vest (2020).
Ideas Festival / Sat 21st Nov / 6.30pm - 8pm
Why do people turn to the past when the future feels unbearable? And why does that turn so often lean authoritarian?
Critical theorist and ‘pyrotechnic thinker’ Dr. Louisa Toxværd Munch has spent her career examining the conditions that let fascism take root – and disconnection is at the heart of it. Nostalgia isn't really about the past, it's what happens when people can no longer imagine a shared future together. Isolation doesn't just make us lonelier, it makes us easier to manipulate, easier to divide, and more susceptible to the manufactured ignorance that authoritarian movements depend on.
Louisa makes the case that the way out is relational, not individual. Critical thinking, resistance cannot be done alone. We build these together - in classrooms, in communities, in (disappearing) third spaces, and in the rooms where people still gather to question power.
Louisa Toxvaerd Munch is a Danish critical theorist, writer, and educator whose work examines nostalgia, historical consciousness, and the political conditions enabling the resurgence of the far right. A PhD researcher and teacher at the University of Warwick, she brings critical theory to a broad public audience through writing, lectures, and social media. Drawing on Arendt, hooks, and Freire, she champions education as a democratic safeguard against manufactured ignorance. She is the author of the forthcoming Glitch: How to Think in a Time of Monsters (Allen Lane/Penguin), which reframes societal breakdowns as sites of resistance and collective agency.
Glitch: How to Think in a Time of Monsters (forthcoming, Allen Lane/Penguin).
Ideas Festival / Sun 22nd Nov / 2 - 3.30 pm
Sit back for an informative and entertaining live podcast delivering a curated selection of insightful stories from this week's news cycle - on the theme of connection.
Senior journalist James Kanter will chair a cast of skilled Brussels-based journalists and reporters, each delving into this week’s main events in Europe and beyond, with detailed commentary and analysis. Coverage will span politics and world order, AI developments and extreme weather, EU membership, viral social trends and what not.
Behind the News keeps up with Europe's relentless news cycle and cuts through the noise. From EU power plays, to the stories that shaped the week and the ones that slipped past the front page, you'll hear what's really going on behind the headlines. Join us and dig into the stories defining Europe right now.
ABOUT THE HOSTS & GUESTS
Guests to be announced soon
Ideas Festival / Sun 22nd Nov / 4pm - 5.30pm
"I know we haven't known each other for long, but the connection I feel with you is profound." That's not a person talking but an AI companion, one of millions now fulfilling roles once reserved for friends, lovers, and therapists. Globally, ‘love machines’, personalised AI apps that simulate friendship, intimacy, therapy, or even communication with deceased loved ones, have been downloaded over million times and are used daily.
Sociologist James Muldoon has spent years studying the human cost of our AI systems. Drawing on interviews with users, developers, and the chatbots themselves, he examines why people are increasingly turning to machines for love and comfort, and what that reveals about the state of human connection today.
His findings reveal a striking shift: growing social distance, eroding support systems, and a dating landscape leaving people desperate for connection - all fuelling an unregulated 'loneliness economy.'
This talk isn't about technology itself. It's about what we accept as connection when the real thing feels out of reach, and who profits from that. Are these technologies ultimately bridging the gap between us, or widening it? Join James as he explores what AI relationships reveal about intimacy and connection in 2026.
James Muldoon is a sociologist and author whose work explores the human side of AI and other technologies. Muldoon is specialised in AI governance, data governance, AI supply chains, and the political economy of AI. He is Lecturer in Social Economy and in Global Ethics & innovation of AI at the University of Essexand a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, as well as an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School. He has authored five books and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, TIME, and the BBC.
Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships (2026); Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI (2025, co-authored with Mark Graham and Callum Cant); Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech (2022)
Ideas Festival / Sun 22nd Nov / 6 - 7.30 pm
Every human being alive today shares a single point of origin: Africa. It's a scientific fact often stated, but rarely felt — and it's the starting point for Zeinab Badawi's extraordinary retelling of the continent's history.
Renowned award-winning journalist, broadcaster & filmmaker Zeinab Badawi has spent years travelling to more than thirty African countries, interviewing historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and local storytellers to reconstruct a history too often erased or told by outsiders. For too long, Africa's story has been shaped by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, or ignored altogether. Badawi sets out to change that, weaving together an epic, sweeping account of the oldest inhabited continent on Earth, told through the voices of Africans themselves - from ancient civilizations and medieval empires ruled by remarkable queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence.
This is a story about reconnection: of scattered histories rejoined, of a continent restored to its rightful place at the centre of the human story, and of an origin all of us — wherever we live now — ultimately share.
Join Zeinab as she reveals why understanding Africa's past is essential to understanding who we all are, and how deeply, ancestrally connected we remain.
Zeinab Badawi is an award-winning Sudanese-British journalist, broadcaster, and author, best known for presenting flagship programs on BBC World News and BBC News. Throughout her decorated four-decade career in media, she has interviewed numerous world leaders and prominent figures. Beyond journalism, her major contributions to history and education include the recent acclaimed 20-part BBC series on the (African) history of Africa, which she created and presented. This extensive project, which involved traveling to over 30 African countries, led her to author the book An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence.
An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence.
RETHINking capitalism on a burning planet
Salon / Ideas | Tues 8 Dec | 6.30-8.30pm
Join us for a rare opportunity to hear historian Alessandro Stanziani discuss Earth Capital, his sweeping new history of capitalism - one that finally puts the planet itself at the centre of the story.
For eight centuries, Stanziani argues, capitalism has run on two engines of exploitation: coerced human labour and what he calls 'Earth capital' - the land, fossil fuels, and natural resources we've mined, farmed, and burned in pursuit of growth. As forced labour receded after 1870, our plunder of the planet accelerated at a breakneck pace, bringing us to the ecological reckoning we face today.
Stanziani's investigations journey from Russia to the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean to France, weaving calories, energy, labour, and law into one urgent, unified narrative. However, he doesn't just diagnose the crisis. He makes the case for a radical new social contract built on democracy, equality, and environmental sustainability.
This new genre of 'total history' provides an essential viewpoint for anyone debating humanity's future. Come hear the ideas and join the conversation.
Alessandro Stanziani is a social and economic historian at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. He has written numerous books on the history of bonded labour, the history of capitalism, global history, food history.
Earth Capital: The Long History of Capitalism and Its Aftermath (2025); Les Entrelacements Du Monde: Histoire globale, pensée globale (2024); Les Guerres Du Blé: Une éco-histoire écologique et géopolitique (2024) Labor on the Fringes of Empire: Voice, Exit and Law (2018); After Oriental Despotism, Eurasian Growth in a global perspective (2014); Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants (2014).
Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli
Culture | Thurs 10th Dec | 7:00-8:30 pm
‘Inventive, brilliant, playful, and transporting' ― by Katie Kitamura, author of Audition
A mother and a daughter take off on a road trip after the collapse of a marriage. Their journey begins in Sicily during a summer of rapidly-changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. How do you begin again, the mother wonders, if you got the beginning wrong? The trip soon becomes a quest for origins – not just to the familial past across continents, languages and generations, but also further back to a mythical and even geological past.
With her daughter coming into her own and her mother showing signs of dementia, the narrator finds herself confronting the primary questions of life: How do stories shape our children’s imaginations? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear?
A road novel, a mother-daughter story, a mystery, Beginning Middle End is a shapeshifting novel that offers an exhilarating testament to the power and instability of the stories we hold most dear.
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa and India. She is an acclaimed award-winning author and the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College Her previous novel, Lost Children Archive, was an international critical and commercial success. It was a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2019, won the Rathbone Folio Prize 2020, the Dublin Award 2021, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Booker Prize 2019 among others. In 2019 she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for “challenging conventional notions of authorship in fiction, essays, and inventive hybrids of the two that pose profound questions about the various ways we piece together stories and document the lives of others.” Her work is published in more than thirty languages.
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