2012 BAA Conference

Thursday, 5 July - Saturday, 7 July 2012
Cultures of Mobility
Amerika Haus, Karolinenplatz 3, Munich

To navigate the immense distances of the American continent - on horseback or railroad, by steamship, car, or airplane - has always been a challenge and need for Americans. Hence, mobility has been crucial for both the personal experience of the individual and the thriving of the nation as a whole. The conference conjoins cultural geographers, political scientists, historians, literary critics, economists and social scientists to take a closer look at mobility in an American context (and beyond). As with previous annual meetings of the BAA, speakers will investigate aspects of American mobility from a decidedly transatlantic perspective. In the panel discussion representatives from academia, private industry and urban planning discuss the growing need for mobility and the associated challenges for society.   

At a Glimpse

Thursday, 5 July 2012

19.00 Opening of Conference with a Keynote by John D. Kasarda

Friday, 6 July 2012
09.30 - 17.00 Panels I, II, III

18.00 Panel Discussion in German at BMW Lenbachplatz
    

Saturday, 7 July 2012

09.30  - 13.00 Panel IV, V

Sunday, 8 July - Wednesday, 11 July 2012
Film Series "Roads, Tracks, and Trails" at Werkstattkino, Fraunhoferstraße 9  

No conference fee - please register for participation

Fon:  +49-89-54 50 40 30 
Fax:  +49-89-54 50 40 35
E-Mail: info@amerika-akademie.de

Detailed Conference Program 

Download the program

Click on the name of the speaker for biographical information and the abstract of the paper.

THURSDAY, 5 JULY 2012

19.00 Conference Opening

Welcome

• Klaus Benesch, Director Bavarian American Academy
• Christina Sharkey, Foreign Commercial Service Principal Officer, U.S. Consulate General Munich 
• Christoph Parchmann, Bavarian Ministry of Sciences, Research, and the Arts

Keynote Address

FRIDAY, 6 JULY 2012

9.30 Panel I: Logistics and Freight Mobility

Chair: Barbara Hahn, University of Wuerzburg  

• Peter Hall, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, CA
  "Resolving" Spatial and Scalar Mismatches in North American Freight Logistics
• Barbara Lenz, German Aerospace Center - DLR, Berlin
  Mobility, Information and Travel Behavior 

11.00 Coffee Break

11.30 Panel II: The Wings of Democracy - Mobility in Times of Airtravel 

Chair: Volker Depkat, University of Regensburg  

• David Courtwright, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, USA
  Airworld: The History, Culture, and Prospects of American Aviation
• Anke Ortlepp, LMU Munich
  (Post-)Modern Architectures: American Airports and the Limits of Mobility 

13.00 Lunch Break

15.00 Panel III: Mobility and the Arts 

Chair: Klaus Benesch, LMU Munich 

• Ted Bishop, University of Alberta, Edmonton, CA
  Tempo Giusto: The Art of the Slow Ride
• François Specq, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon
  Thoreau's Geographies of (Im)mobilities  

18.00 Panel Discussion in German:
Mobilität / Immobilität - Wege in die Zukunft

Venue: at BMW Lenbachplatz

Moderation: Klaus Benesch, LMU Munich 

• Thomas Hamacher, Planung und Design von E-mobility Lösungen, Technical University Munich
• Klaus Mainzer, Wissenschaftsphilosoph und Leiter der Carl von Linde-Akademie, Technical University Munich
• Armin Nassehi, Kultur- und Wissenschaftssoziologe, LMU Munich
• Manuel Sattig, BMW Group, Kommunikations-Manager project i

SATURDAY, 7 JULY 2012

9.30 Panel IV: Social Mobility 

Chair: Stefan Schirm, University of Bochum

• Magdalena Nowicka, LMU Munich
  Life-Trajectories of Poles in the UK: Deskilling in a Transnational Perspective
• Ludger Pries, University of Bochum
  Cross-Border Mobility and Transnational Social Spaces - the Example of Mexico-US-Migration 

11.00 Coffee Break

11.30 Panel V: Cultural Mobility

Chair: Heike Paul, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg   

• Phillip Vannini, Royal Roads University, Victoria, CA
  Cultures of Mobility on Canada's West Coast
• Alexandra Ganser, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
  Reading Multiple Mobilities: Chuck Palahniuk's Fugitives and Refugees 

13.00 End of Conference 

The following organizations support the conference

TUM - Technical University Munich

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Film Series: July 8-11,2012 
Roads, Tracks, and Trails
at Werkstattkino, Fraunhoferstr. 9

  Download the film program

Sunday, July 8

• 8 p.m.: Vanishing Point
  USA, 1971; 99 min.; OV; Action/Drama; D: Richard C. Sarafian;
  A: Barry Newman, Cleavon Little, and Dean Jagger
  Kowalski works for a car delivery service. He takes delivery of a 1970 Dodge Challenger to take from Colorado to San Francisco, California. Throw in lots of chase scenes, gay hitchhikers, a naked woman riding a motorbike, lots of Mopar and you've got a great cult hit from the early 70's.
• 10 p.m.: Two-Lane Blacktop
  USA, 1972; 102 min.; OV; Drama; D: Monte Hellman; A: James Taylor, Warren Oates, and Laurie Bird
  Story of two men drag racing across the USA in a primer grey 1955 chevy. Dennis Wilson is the mechanic, James Taylor is the driver.

Monday, July 9

• 8 p.m.: Electra Glide in Blue
  USA, 1973; 114 min.; OV; Crime/Drama/Mystery; D: James William Guercio; A: Robert Blake, Billy Green Bush, and Mitch Ryan
  A short Arizona motorcycle cop gets his wish and is promoted to Homicide following the mysterious murder of a hermit. He is forced to confront his illusions about himself and those around him in order to solve the case, eventually returning to solitude in the desert.
• 10 p.m.: Easy Rider
  USA, 1969; 95 min.; OV; Crime/Drama; D: Dennis Hopper; A: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson
  Two counterculture bikers travel from Los Angeles to New Orleans in search of America.

Tuesday, July 10

• 8 p.m.: Silver Streak (German title: Trans-Amerika-Express)
  USA, 1976; 114 min.; OV; Action/Comedy/Crime; D: Arthur Hiller; A: Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, and Jill Clayburgh
  On a long-distance train trip, a man finds romance but also finds himself in danger of being killed, or at least pushed off the train.
• 10 p.m.: The General (German Title: Der General)
  USA, 1926; 75 min.; OV; Action/Adventure/Comedy; D: Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton; A: Buster Keaton, Marion Mack, and Glen Cavender
  When Union spies steal an engineer's beloved locomotive, he pursues it single-handedly and straight through enemy lines.

Wednesday, July 11

• 6 p.m.: Free Land
  USA, 2009; 63 min.; OV; Documentary/Biography/Drama; D: Minda Martin; A: Judy Bauerlein and Joan Westmoreland
  A documentary of a woman's quest to understand the roots of her family's poverty and homelessness, revealing a national history of displacement and loss..
• 8 p.m.: Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (German title: Mr. Hobbs macht Ferien)
  USA, 1962; 116 min.; OV; Comedy/Family; D: Henry Koster; A: James Stewart, Maureen O"Hara and Fabian
  Mr. Hobbs wants to spend a quiet holiday at the beach, but his wife has invited all their family to stay with them. A get-away movie with lots of entanglements. 

Biographical Information & Abstracts

Download the bios & abstracts  

CHAIRS

Klaus Benesch is professor of English and American Studies and, currently, Dean of the School for Linguistics and Literature at LMU München and Director of the Bavarian American Academy. 

Volker Depkat is professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg.
Barbara Hahn is professor of Economic Geography at the University of Wuerzburg.    

Heike Paul is professor of North American Studies at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. 

Stefan Schirm is professor of Politcal Science at the University of Bochum.

SPEAKERS of the PANELS  

Ted Bishop
Ted Bishop is a professor of English and film studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He writes and teaches in the areas of modernist literature, print-culture history, and creative non-fiction. He is the author of Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books (2005, 2006), which was named a "Best Book" by the Toronto Globe and Mail, CBC' s Talking Books, and Playboy magazine. As Edward Bishop he has published articles on James Joyce and modernist bookstores, and has edited the Shakespeare Head Critical Edition of Jacob's Room (2004), Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room: The Holograph Draft (1998), The Bloomsbury Group (1992), Virginia Woolf (1991), and A Virginia Woolf Chronology (1989). His essay on page design, "Mind the Gap," appears in the new Norton Critical Edition of Jacob's Room. He is currently working on a history of ink.
Abstract - Tempo Giusto: The Art of the Slow Ride
"When we are too ardent, we are less subtle. When we rush to sensual pleasure, we blur all the delights along the way," says the aristocratic French mistress in Milan Kundera's novella Slowness. But her sentiments are echoed by a Harley Davidson rider in who speaks of the pleasure of riding from Oregon to Alaska at 90 kmh. Developing ideas from the author's Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books, this paper explores the relations of speed and space, and the links between slow music, slow reading, and slow motorcycling. 

David Courtwright
David Courtwright is presidential professor at the University of North Florida, USA, where he offers courses on the global history of medicine and disease, the comparative history of violence, and twentieth-century American history. Courtwright has published several books such as Sky as Frontier: Adventure, Aviation, and Empire (2004), Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (2002), Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (2001), and Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (1998). His publications include "The Routine Stuff: How Flying Became a Form of Mass Transportation," in Reconsidering a Century of Flight (2003). 
Abstract - Airworld: The History, Culture, and Prospects of American Aviation
In its infancy, aviation was a frontier activity. Flying was a risky adventure pursued mainly by young men in a difficult, remote, sparsely occupied environment-the sky. But American aviation's frontier stage passed as the sky inexorably turned into "Airworld," a tightly controlled, commercialized zone of human activity which millions of men and women entered every day. Passengers endured boredom and Panopticonic surveillance for the sake of safe travel and unprecedented mobility. The paper reviews the technological, institutional, military, social, and economic developments that turned flying into a routine mass experience. It also considers whether the Airworld we take for granted has entered a phase of long-term decline, due to internal problems and the rise of alternative technologies, notably digital communications and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles).

Alexandra Ganser
Alexandra Ganser is assistant professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and a Fulbright alumna from the University of Oklahoma 2003-04. Her research interests include space and mobility studies, transnational and postcolonial studies, gender-, Native American- and popular culture studies. Her first book, Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women's Road Narratives, 1970-2000 was published in 2009. She has been a European Fellow at the Bruce Center for American Studies (Keele University, GB) and Christian Daniel Ebeling Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society Worcester (USA). Her second book on the figure of the pirate as an articulation of crisis in transatlantic Anglophone texts from the late 17th to the 19th century is in progress.
Abstract - Reading Multiple Mobilities: Chuck Palahniuk's Fugitives and Refugees

This paper will begin by giving an overview of mobility studies as a paradigm for literary and cultural studies, asking how American cultural texts have been shaped by and are shaping national myths of mobility. As an example and in a second step, it will take a closer look at Chuck Palahniuk's guidebook to Portland, Oregon, Fugitives and Refugees (2003), critically reading the multiple mobilities that the book addresses both in form and content. Through the lens of mobility studies, the city of Portland as presented by Palahniuk emerges at the crossroads of hegemonic and underground movements.

Peter Hall 
Peter Hall is associate professor of urban studies at the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. His research examines the connections between port cities, seaports, and logistics, as well as local economic, employment and community development. He is co-editor of Integrating Seaports and Trade Corridors (with Robert J. McCalla, Claude Comtois, and Brian Slack, 2011) and the forthcoming Cities, Regions and Flow (2012). His research has been published in edited volumes and academic journals including Environment and Planning A, Urban Studies, Regional Studies, Journal of Urban Technology, GeoJournal, Economic Development Quarterly, Maritime Policy and Management, and The Canadian Geographer and Economic Geography. Hall holds a doctorate in city regional planning from the University of California at Berkeley.
Abstract - "Resolving" Spatial and Scalar Mismatches in North American Freight Logistics
Proponents regard contemporary freight logistics systems as efficient solutions to the problem of getting the goods to the right place, on time, and at low cost. Opponents regard them as external, irrepressible forces that impose pollution, congestion, and other costs on people and places. Both proponents and opponents understand freight logistics as tightly integrated mobility systems. This paper urges a modified view of freight logistics systems which recognizes the uncertainties faced by logistics chain actors as they seek to mobilize the resources required to overcome the constraints of time, space, scale and social acceptance. Actually existing freight logistics systems are contingent and uneven ‘resolutions' to the problem of spatial and scalar mismatch. Hence, instead of viewing freight logistics as integrated systems, Hall's approach highlights the constant tension between integration and disintegration in their organization. He uses the Vancouver port-logistics complex as a case to illustrate how these integrative and disintegrative tendencies play out within and across different spatial scales.

John D. Kasarda,
John D. Kasarda is Director of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School, USA. Kasarda also heads the Institute's Center for Air Commerce. He has published more than 100 articles and nine books on airport cities, aviation infrastructure, urban economic development, and competitiveness. His most recent book is Aerotropolis: Landing in the Heart of 21st Century Urban Planning (2012). He is frequently quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Business Week, and international media. Kasarda has offered numerous executive programs on air logistics, firm siting, global supply-chain management, and airport area development to multinational firms such as Boeing, Airbus, FedEx, Lufthansa, DHL, Thai Airways International, Caterpillar Logistics, Bank of America and Deloitte & Touche.

Abstract - The Rise of the Aerotropolis
After crisply defining the term Aerotropolis and its macro causes the conference participants will be taken on a virtual world-wide tour of these new aviation-driven urban developments - beginning with transforming airport terminal cores into urban squares (such as the terminal commercial plaza with its Kempinski Hotel at Munich) and progressing partially outward to evolving Airport Cites such as Amsterdam Schiphol, Frankfurt, and Hong Kong, and on to full-blown Aerotropolises such as the Dulles Aerotropolis in Northern Virginia, Dallas (Ft. Worth), Dubai, and New Songdo City. Of special interest will be how the aerotropolis model is being incorporated in struggling urban areas such as Detroit and Memphis to improve their competitiveness and prospects for urban revitalization based on better leveraging their air and surface transportation infrastructures.

Barbara Lenz
Barbara Lenz heads the Institute of Transport Research at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt - DLR). She holds the special DLR professorship for transport geography at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Lenz specializes in the fields of sustainable mobility, communication, and transport. She is co-editor of Produktion - Distribution - Konsum: Auswirkungen von Kommunikations- und Informationstechnologien (IKT) auf Wirtschaft- und Versorgungsverkehr (2010), co-author of Das Zeitbudget der Mobilität aus kulturgeschichtlicher Perspektive (2005) and Neue Medien, Raum und Verkehr: Wissenschaftliche Analysen und praktische Erfahrungen (2000).

Abstract - Mobility, Information and Travel Behavior
There are several signs that we are currently living through a change in mobility behavior - car purchase and use is shifting to later stages in people's lives, people are opening up to the use of new mobility concepts, elderly people are much more mobile than they were just a few years ago. These signs are not restricted to some regions or countries, but can be found on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Information is fuelling this change, particularly by the mainstreaming of internet and mobile telephony, which allows for radical extension and diversification of information. But don't we overestimate the role of information, given that most of our everyday mobility is a matter of routines? The contribution will discuss this issue from a more general point of view and give empirical insights from experience made in Germany and the US.  

Magdalena Nowicka
Magdalena Nowicka is research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen and at the Institute of Sociology, LMU Munich. She is the author of a number of contributions on mobility, cosmopolitanism, spatial relations and European integration. Her current interests are transnational migration to Germany and the UK, mobility of professionals and educational migrants, entrepreneurship of migrants, and qualitative methodology in social sciences. Recent publications include The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism (co-editor, 2011) and Cosmopolitanism in Practice (co-editor, 2009). 

Abstract - Life-Trajectories of Poles in the UK: Deskilling in a Transnational Perspective
This presentation treats the employment trajectories of skilled and highly-skilled Polish migrants in the UK. It focuses on the question of how cultural capital - formal education, language proficiency, and educational aspirations - is validated in the context of migration. With a biographical approach it will investigate how personal strategies of coping with degrading and struggles for career advancement interfere with ‘collective trajectories' and particular socio-geographical contexts. The question is whether and how living in a transnational social space influences migrants' perceptions and biographical resources in the process of validation of skills and knowledge abroad. By considering the national framing of educational and labor market systems, this presentation adds to the existing models on highly-skilled migration and deskilling due to migration and claims that deskilling often takes place before migration. Respectively, upgrade of own skills is gradual as well, and to some extent de-coupled from migration. Subjective perceptions and the swaping judgement of own conditions through the rules of country of destination and origin is of key importance for understanding how validation of knowledge and skills exactly links to migration..

Anke Ortlepp
Anke Ortlepp is professor of American History at LMU Munich. She currently holds the Verville Fellowship 2010/11 at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. She has taught at the University of Cologne and University of Bonn. Before joining LMU in 2010 she was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. Among her publications are Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange (coeditor, 2011), Mit den Dingen leben: Zur Geschichte der Alltagsgegenstände (coeditor, 2010), Deutsch-amerikanische Frauenvereine in Milwaukee (Wisconsin), 1844-1914 (2004), and Taking Up Space: New Approaches to American History (coeditor, 2004).
Abstract - (Post-)Modern Architectures: American Airports and the Limits of Mobility
American airports evolved as forms of architecture in the postwar decades. So did their meanings as landmarks in American cultural landscapes. Built as symbols of a new age of mobility in the 1950s and 1960s, airport terminals in the following decades came to give built expression to the limits of mobility. Congested, chaotic, and confusing, they came to symbolize aviation's dystopian aspects. At the same time, we have to understand airports - their aesthetics, spatial formations, and politics of movement - as articulations of hierarchies of power in American society. Looking at a number of case studies this presentation will explore the shifting spatial dynamics of America"s aerial gateways and connect the evolution of this building type to major developments of American postwar history.   

Ludger Pries 
Ludger Pries holds a chair for sociology at the Ruhr University in Bochum. He has taught and done research in Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and the USA, mainly on the sociology of organizations, work and labor regulation, migration in international comparison, transnationalization, transnational migration, and processes of social incorporation. His recent publications include Migration and Integration. Reflections on Our Common Future (as ed. 2011), Transnationalisierung. Theorie und Empirie grenzüberschreitender Vergesellschaftung (2010), and Erwerbsregulierung in einer globalisierten Welt (2010). Pries is also an associate editor of the journal Global Networks. 

Abstract - Cross-Border Mobility and Transnational Social Spaces - the Example of Mexico-US-Migration

Patterns of cross border mobility and especially of migration are differentiating. Migration is no longer the definite one-way-movement from one country to another as it was thought for a long time. Transnational migration is a multiple boarder shifting leading to entanglements in different geographic spaces and sometimes to transnational social spaces. Methodological nationalism takes the national container for granted as the socio-geographic unit of reference for social analysis - extended concepts of multi-level and pluri-dimensional socio-geographic spaces are needed.

  
François Specq
François Specq is professor of American literature and culture at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, (Université de Lyon), France, and a researcher affiliated with the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). His research and teaching interests are American literature, American transcendentalism, environmental literature, abolitionism, as well as women's rights and feminism. He has published critical studies and translations of works by Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, and Mary Austin, for example of Frederick Douglass and Thoreau's De l'esclavage en Amérique (2006) and of Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Des femmes en Amérique, 2011). Currently, he is co-editor of Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon (forthcoming).
Abstract - Thoreau's Geographies of (Im)mobility
Thoreau's "Walking" has been such a cornerstone of the American environmental movement that critical focus has mostly been on his famous celebration of "wildness" ("In wildness is the preservation of the world"). The few critical studies that have addressed other aspects of Thoreau's essay have considered his celebration of the West, and tried to solve what may seem to be a contradiction between the logics of conquest and of preservation. The present paper will seek to bring together these two strands through an approach that more fully pays attention to the complexities of Thoreau's geography, in which mobility and immobility are held in creative tension. 

Phillip Vannini 
Phillip Vannini is professor at the School of Communication & Culture at the Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada. His research fields include mobilities, embodiment, material culture studies, technology and culture, cultural geographies, non-representational theory, and ethnography. He is author/editor of several books, including Technologies of Mobility in the Americas (2012), Popularizing Research: Engaging New Media, Genres, and Audiences (2012), The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture: A Sociology of the Senses (2011), and Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches (2009). Vannini holds the Canada Research Chair in innovative learning and public ethnography.
Abstract - Cultures of Mobility on Canada"s West Coast
This presentation features both empirical characterizations and a theoretical treatment of islands as mobility practices. Through video and ethnographic description Vannini describes and interprets how islandness is done on the West Coast of Canada. Thus islandness is understood corporeally, affectually, practically, intimately, as a visceral mobility experience. Basing his conceptual treatment on the non-representational idea of dwelling, place is approached as a kind of mobility practice. Vannini views the key performances through which an island becomes such as practices of incorporation. Inhabitants, we believe, incorporate a place not by way of mental design or blueprints, or by way of signifying comparisons and juxtapositions, but rather by sheer practical, creative, skilful kinetic engagement with its affordances. Thus the practices of West Coast Canadian islanders are understood as agents who assemble together an island by way of making use of whatever is at hand, solving going kinetic concerns as they present themselves.

SPEAKERS of the PANEL DISCUSSION 

Klaus Benesch (Moderation)

Klaus Benesch ist Professor für Nordamerikanische Literaturgeschichte an der LMU München und Direktor der Bayerischen Amerika-Akademie. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Amerikanische Literaturen und Kulturen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts; Architektur, Urbanismus und Technikgeschichte; Literatur- und Medientheorie; sowie ethnische Literaturen und Diaspora Studies. 2004 erhielt er das „Mellon Fellowship" des „Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center" an der Universität von Texas. Benesch lehrte an der Amherst Universität in Massachusetts und der Weber State Universität in Utah. Er habilitierte sich mit seiner Arbeit „Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance" an der Universität Freiburg. Seine neusten Publikationen sind „Cultural Immobility: Thoreau, Heidegger, and the Modern Politics of Place" (in Spatial Practices, im Druck), „Our Bikes Are Us: Speed, Motorcycles and the American Tradition of a ‘Democratic' Technology" (in Inter¬national Journal of Motorcycle Studies, 2010) und Scientific Cultures - Technological Challenges. A Transatlantic Perspective (mit Meike Zwingenberger, 2009).

Thomas Hamacher
Thomas Hamacher ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Energiewirtschaft und Anwendungstechnik an der Technischen Universität München. Er forscht auf dem Gebiet der Energie- und Systemanalyse, besonders zu Elektromobilität, städtischen Energiesystemen, Integration erneuerbarer Energien in das Stromnetz und Energiemobilität. Er ist Mitglied des Wissenschaftszentrums Umwelt (WZU) der Universität Augsburg, sowie der Energiearbeitsgruppe der European Physical Society (EPS) und seit April 2010 kommissarischer Leiter des Lehrstuhls für Energiewirtschaft und Anwendungstechnik. Seit 1996 arbeitet Hamacher am Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, zuletzt als Leiter der Gruppe für Energie- und Systemstudien. Seine wichtigsten Publikationen sind "Developing a Roadmap for the Future Energy Infrastructure" (mit Reiter, Botzenhart, Mühlich und Reuter, 2009) und "Global transportation scenarios in the multi-regional EFDATIMES energy model" (mit Mühlich, 2009).

Klaus Mainzer 
Klaus Mainzer hat den Lehrstuhl für Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie an der Technischen Universität in München inne. Er arbeitet als Wissenschaftsphilosoph über Grundlagen und Zukunftsperspektiven von Wissenschaft und Technik. Vor seiner Berufung auf den Lehrstuhl für Philosophie und Wissenschafts-theorie an der TUM und seiner Tätigkeit als Direktor der Carl von Linde-Akademie im Jahr 2008, arbeitete er als Professor und Prorektor an der Universität Konstanz. Von 1988 bis 2008 war er als Professor und Gründungsdirektor des Instituts für interdisziplinäre Informatik an der Universität Augsburg tätig. Seine Schlüsselpublikationen sind Leben als Maschine? Von der Systembiologie zu Robotik und Künstlicher Intelligenz (2010), Thinking in Complexity. The Computational Dynamics of Matter, Mind, and Mankind (1994) und Artikel wie "The Emergence of Temporal Structures in Dynamical Systems" (in Online Foundations of Physics, 2010). 

Armin Nassehi 
Armin Nassehi ist seit 1998 Inhaber des Lehrstuhls I für Soziologie an der Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität München. Er forscht und lehrt im Bereich der Kultursoziologie, der Politischen Soziologie sowie der Wissens- und Wissenschaftssoziologie. Vor seinem Ruf an den Soziologie-Lehrstuhl der LMU hatte Nassehi Lehrstuhlvertretungen an den Universitäten München und Münster inne. Seit 2005 ist er Mitglied des Beirates der Bayerischen Architektenkammer und seit 2006 aktiv im Vorstand des Münchner Kompetenzzentrums Ethik. Darüber hinaus berät Nassehi Firmen und Institutionen und hält Vorträge zu Themen wie soziale Mobilität, kulturelle Identität und Globalisierung. 2010 übernahm er die Sendereihe „GMBH - Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung" des Fernsehsenders BR-alpha, die verschiedene Perspektiven der Entscheidungsfindung aufzeigt und hinterfragt. Seine neusten Publikationen sind Mit dem Taxi durch die Gesellschaft. Soziologische Storys (2010), Nation - Ethnie - Minderheit. Beiträge zur Aktualität ethnischer Konflikte (1997) und Aufsätze wie "Dichte Räume. Städte als Synchronisations- und Inklusionsmaschinen" (in Differenzierungen des Städtischen, 2002). 

Manuel Sattig
Manuel Sattig ist seit 2010 Kommunikations-Manager für project i der BMW AG. In dieser Funktion ist er verantwortlich für die Strategie, Planung und Koordination der project i Kommunikationsaktivitäten. Er studierte zwischen 1995 und 1996 an der Universität von Bamberg Betriebswirtschaftslehre und machte seinen Abschluss als Diplom-Kaufmann 2001 an der Universität von Hamburg. Sattig blickt auf eine langjährige Karriere im Bereich Marketing und Vertrieb bei der BMW AG und bei MINI Deutschland zurück. So war er unter anderem Aftersales Launchmanager für den BMW X3 und den BMW 1er und Projektleiter des Elektroautos MINI E. Zudem entwickelt Sattig neue Mobilitätskonzepte für den Individualverkehr.