Pınar Akıskalıoğlu is a business activist who uses business as a tool to create a positive impact.

She started her professional career at the global youth-run organisation, AIESEC, and worked for the vision of peace and fulfilment of humankind’s potential. She was working as Global Director of Strategy before leaving the organization. Later, she joined a leading global consumer goods & technology company, Henkel. During her corporate career, she took various local and regional roles. Lately, she served as Head of Marketing.

Coming from big beauty, Pınar had an epiphany about the constant race to offer people new trendy products all the time. She then founded TAKK, an anti-brand personal care company that promises to sell people only what they need. Educated at the University of Oxford and Harvard Business School, Pınar has a clear understanding of the rules of the current economic structure, yet she is an optimist and believes humanity can build new systems that privilege wider society rather than the few.

Her articles about degrowth in the consumer industries have been featured in Fast Company - 'Why the Future of Business Must Be Anti-growth', and in Sage – ‘Why Purpose Matters for Every Small Business'. She has been interviewed for the Oxford Leadership 2050 Podcast with the title of 'Reinventing the rules of the game' and for Medium with the title of 'Meet the Disruptors'. Beauty addict magazines Vogue and Elle featured Pınar's work for TAKK as an emerging trend in the industry. Her thoughts about company culture and purpose have been further quoted by Fast Company and Forbes.

Pınar is also the founder of Punk Business School, working hard to put humanity at the heart of business education.

Cengiz Arca graduated from Çukurova University Faculty of Medicine in 2017, and in 2021 he completed his residency training at Hacettepe University Faculty of Medicine, Department of Mental Health and Diseases and became a psychiatry specialist. In addition to his medical school education and psychiatry residency, he studied sociology at Ankara University, Faculty of Language and History-Geography. Since 2019, his podcast series “Psikiyatri ve Duvarın Ardı” (Psychiatry and Behind the Wall) has won nominations for the best podcast by many organizations. He is the author of two books, Depresyon Ne İşe Yarar? (What Does Depression Do, Küsurat Yayınları, 2022) and Romantik Kıskançlık (Romantic Jealousy, Destek Yayınları, 2024).

Eda Çaça is a literary agent, editor, and scout. She is the founder of Atlas Publishing Lab, a dynamic publishing agency based in Istanbul, Turkey. She has been in the publishing industry since 2010. After working for eight years in copyright agencies and serving as an editor-in-chief at Kolektif Kitap for five years, she founded Atlas Publishing Lab in 2022, a platform dedicated to promoting literary culture, representing international publishers and authors in Turkey and Turkish authors abroad, curating and organizing book events and talk series, coordinating editorial projects, commissioning book initiatives, and fostering a vibrant community of authors, translators, and editors. Eda holds graduate and postgraduate degrees in Philosophy from Middle East Technical University and Bilgi University respectively.

Tim Leberecht is an author, curator, and entrepreneur, and the co-founder and co-CEO of the House of Beautiful Business, the global network for the life-centered economy. Previously, Tim served as the chief marketing officer of NBBJ, a global design and architecture firm. From 2006 to 2013, he was the chief marketing officer of product design and innovation consultancy Frog Design.

He has spoken at numerous conferences worldwide including AI Masters, DLD, HSM Expo, New Cities Summit, Online Marketing Rockstars, Re:publica, SXSW, The Conference, The Economist Big Rethink, The Next Web, Unleash, Thinking Digital, WOBI, and the World Economic Forum. His TED Talks “3 Ways to (Usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand” and “4 Ways to Build a Human Company in the Age of Machines” have been viewed more than 3 million times to date.

Moreover, Tim delivered keynotes and workshops for many leading global brands, including high-profile senior executive forums for Adobe, Airbus, BCG, Cap Gemini, Daimler, Deloitte, Galp, Google, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Merck, Porsche, SAP, Siemens, SkyUPS, and many others.

Tim served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Values from 2013 to 2016. He is a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader.

He is the author of the book The Business Romantic (Harper Business, 2015), which has been translated into ten languages to date, and The End of Winning (Droemer, 2020). He is currently working on a new book about curation. His writing regularly appears in publications such as Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, Inc, Psychology Today, Quartz, and Wired. He is the co-publisher of the Book of Beautiful Business (2019), and the co-host of the Next Visions podcast with Porsche as well as the Tangier Memos podcast.

Utku Özmakas received his PhD in Philosophy from Hacettepe University in 2016 and became an associate professor in 2021. His research interests include political philosophy, biopolitics, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and philosophy of language. He has translated nearly thirty books by thinkers such as Simon Critchley, Thomas Lemke, Terry Eagleton, Jacques Ranciere, İkbal Ahmet, Stuart Hall and Nancy Fraser. As well as teaching at the university he also works as an editor. His books are Şiirimizde Milenyum Kuşağı (Millennium Generation in Our Poetry, Pan, 2008), Şiir İçin Paralaks (Parallax for Poetry, 160. Kilometre, 2013), Biopolitik: Güç ve Direniş (Biopolitics: Power and Resistance, İletişim, 2018), and Kartezyen Prens (The Cartesian Prince, ZoomBook, 2022).

Maxime Rovere is an internationally renowned researcher, associated with the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He is one of the leading French specialists on Spinoza: he translated the Ethics from Latin and annotated and illustrated it with an international team (Flammarion, 2025), and he has also published Spinoza: methodes pour exister (CNRS-Editions, 2013) and the story of the life of Spinoza and his friends (Le clan Spinoza. Amsterdam, 1677. L'invention de la liberté, Flammarion, 2017). He also develops his thinking known as “interactional ethics”. The books devoted to it are Que faire des cons? Pour ne pas en rester un soi-même (Flammarion, 2020) and L'école de la vie [The School of Life] and Se vouloir du bien et se faire du mal. Philosophie de la dispute [To wish oneself well and to do oneself harm. Philosophy of dispute] (Flammarion, 2022)

Mehmet Şiray received his BA in Philosophy from METU, MA from Bilkent University and PhD from Johannes Gutenberg University. His research interests include aesthetics, philosophy of art, contemporary philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, film and performance studies. He has worked as an assistant and part-time lecturer at Bilgi, Bilkent, Kadir Has, Işık, Üsküdar, Artuklu and Johannes Gutenberg Mainz Universities. In the 2018-2019 academic year, he completed his postdoctoral research titled “Contemplating Image Today: The Critical Reading of Jacques Rancière's, Georges Didi-Huberman and W. J. T. Mitchell's Ideas on Image” in the “Critical Thinking” program as a visiting professor at Freie Universität Berlin. His book Performance and Performativity was published by Peter Lang in 2009. He is a faculty member at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Department of Philosophy.

Zeynep Talay Turner teaches philosophy in the Philosophy and Social Thought MA Program at Istanbul Bilgi University, where she is also the director of the Cultural Studies MA Program. She is the author of Philosophy, Literature, and the Dissolution of the Subject (Peter Lang, 2014). Working on philosophies of the self, 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, and the relationship between philosophy and literature, Talay Turner has written on Nietzsche, Spinoza, Bergson, and Musil.