Highlights from this session:

• Why ‘City of Joy’ elevates collective healing above individual therapy, and how it supports the rising of women into community leaders
• Envisioning a new and enchanting culture that we want to live into rather than reacting against the narrative of patriarchy
• The vital need for collective apology in order to liberate nations from past harms and create lasting change

V (formerly Eve Ensler) is the Tony award-winning playwright and author of the theatrical phenomenon, The Vagina Monologues. She is the author of books including The Apology and In the Body of the World, as well as The New York Times best-seller I am an Emotional Creature.  She helped create the play That Kindness: Nurses in Their Own Words presented by BAM. She’s the founder of V-Day, a global activist movement that has raised over 120 million dollars to end violence against all women (cisgender and transgender,) those who hold fluid identities, nonbinary people, girls, and the planet—and the founder of One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence in over 200 countries, as well as a co-founder of City of Joy. She writes regularly for The Guardian.

Highlights from this session:

• How the harms of trauma can be minimized by educating journalists and news organizations.
• The biological drives that affect our functionality in extreme situations.
• How a free press and access to good quality news bolsters democracy and enriches society

Professor Feinstein’s research relates to the study of journalists in conflict situations. He has published a series of studies exploring the psychological effects of conflict on journalists covering various regions and events. He is the author of a number of books, including his most recent – Shooting War. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study mental health issues in post-apartheid Namibia and a Peabody award for producing a documentary, “Under Fire” based on his research of journalists in war zones.

Highlights from this session:

• The Altar as a collective grieving practice that allows us to sit with the entire matrix of emotions and transmute fear into love
• Orienting to climate collapse as an intimate process with the self
• How climate grief prepares the body to be in a sacred relationship with the web of life

Nico Cary (he/him) is a dharma and medicine path practitioner, mindfulness facilitator for InsightLA, writer, and performance artist. Currently, his multimedia installations on collective grieving processes have been featured at the Smithsonian, and as a part of The Healing Project at Yerba Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Highlights from this session:

• Why the next step in this ‘sacred space’ between the death and emergence of new civilizational structures is based on regeneration and ecosystem awareness
• What Indigenous prophecy as well as practices of storytelling, daily ritual, and fire ceremony teach us about healing in times of collective depression
• Experiencing deeper co-sensing capacities and levels of knowing through social spaces that activate embodied, whole systems learning

Melanie Goodchild is Anishinaabe (Ojibway), moose clan, from Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Ketetgaunseebee First Nations. She is a systems and complexity scholar using a relational systems thinking approach at the nexus of multiple worldviews.

Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer in the MIT Management Sloan School, and the Founding Chair of the Presencing Institute. He introduced the concept of “presencing”— learning from the emerging future — in his bestselling books Theory U and Presence (the latter co-authored with P. Senge et al). He co-founded MITx u.lab, a platform that has activated a global ecosystem of transformational change involving more than 160,000 users. In March 2020, Otto and his colleagues launched GAIA (Global Activation of Intention and Action), a free, online learning journey geared toward profound civilizational renewal.

Highlights from this session:

• Racism is not about intention but about systemic enculturation
• Understanding our defense mechanisms as distractions that protect our self-image
• Why the insecurities in how we navigate situations of race and power are a sign of movement

Tupoka Ogette was born in Leipzig in 1980. She holds a master’s degree in African Studies and German as a Foreign Language from the University of Leipzig and a master’s degree in International Business from the Graduate School of Grenoble. Since 2012, Tupoka has worked nationwide as a consultant and trainer in the field of racism critique. Her manual published in March 2017 “exit RACISM. Learning to Think Critically of Racism” is a SPIEGEL bestseller. In 2019, she was named one of the 25 most influential women of the year by Edition F magazine. SPIEGEL Online included her as one of ten women in its educational canon on theory and politics. In 2021, About You named her “Idol of The Year.” Most recently, she published her book “And Now You. Living Critically of Racism.”