2026 Annual Colloquium of the Bavarian Academic Forum Wissenschaft in Zeiten gesellschaftlicher Spannungen

President - University Board of Management

Johannes Wallacher - Munich School of Philosophy

Anne Kleinknecht is a journalist and moderator at the Bayerische Rundfunk. She presents live news at the information station BR24 and moderates the phone-in programmes "Sonntags um elf" and "Mitreden! Deutschland diskutiert". Before that she was an editor and author for the BR editorial department "Wissen und Bildung aktuell" and further ARD editorial science departments for several years. Anne Kleinknecht has published numerous radio features, most recently the three-part podcast "Der verbotene Vater" in Bayern2. Anne Kleinknecht was born in Luxembourg and studied communication science and journalism at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and the Institut Français de Presse of the Université Panthéon Assas in Paris. 

Peter Dabrock has been Professor of Systematic Theology (Ethics) at the Department of Theology at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg since 2010. He was a board member of the German Ethics Council from 2012 until 2020, and its chairman from 2016 until 2020. Since 2022 he has been a member, and the first theologian, on the executive board of Acatech, the German Academy of Science and Engineering. His research, set out in more than 400 books and articles as well as numerous media appearances, focuses on the ethics of technical and (bio)scientific interference with human life forms (from germ line intervention to AI) as well as on questions on and interpretations of social and political dynamics of conflict (universalism-particularism; justice; the public, social solidarity, role of socially challenged science).

Prof. Dr. Peter Dabrock - Chair of Systematic Theology II (Ethics)

Prof. Dr. Ursula Münch is Professor of Political Science (on leave) at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich and has been Director of the Akademie für Politische Bildung (Academy for Political Education) since November 2011 – a scientific institution funded by the Free State of Bavaria for independent and non-partisan political education. Apart from numerous other functions, she has been a member of the scientific board of the German Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung) since 2021.

Ursula Münch, Director of the Akademie für Politische Bildung

Since 2012, Dr. Justus Henke has been research assistant and since 2019 junior research group leader at the Institute for Higher Education Research (HoF). His research focuses on science communication, science management, third mission of higher education institutions, artificial intelligence and higher education financing.

Justus Henke, Dr. | HoF

Dr. Nils C. Kumkar studied sociology and economics in Göttingen and Los Angeles and obtained his doctorate at Leipzig University in 2016 with his sociological doctoral thesis on crisis protests after the worldwide financial crisis in the USA and Germany, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018 as a monograph titled "The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and the Great Recession". Since 2016, he has been research assistant at SOCIUM – Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy at University of Bremen; he was a Fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles in 2025 and during the 2025/26 winter semester he represented the Chair of Sociological Theory at University of Bamberg. He is currently coordinating an international and interdisciplinary research project on the creation of conspiracy theory knowledge in German-speaking countries, which he is leading together with Sarah Speck, Oliver Nachtwey and Markus Brunner. His research focuses on sociological theory, sociology of knowledge and qualitative methods; he focuses in particular on social inequality experience, protest and criticism as well as on questions on the truth of society. In 2022 his monograph "Alternative Fakten: zur Praxis der kommunikativen Erkenntnisverweigerung" (Alternative facts: the practice of communicative knowledge refusal) was published, and in 2025 "Polarisierung: Über die Ordnung der Politik" (Polarisation: on the order of politics), both in edition suhrkamp. Apart from numerous scientific publications, he also writes for the feuilleton sections of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Spiegel and the Zeit.

SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy, University of Bremen

Prof. Dr. Michael Reder is Professor of Practical Philosophy with a focus on international understanding and Vice President for Research at Munich School of Philosophy. His research focuses on political and social philosophy, ethics, democracy, global solidarity as well as societal challenges posed by artificial intelligence. He is in charge of numerous national and international research projects and engages in interdisciplinary dialogue between science, politics and society.

Michael Reder - Munich School of Philosophy

Feser, Uta M. Professor Dr. - HNU

Prof. Dr. Stefan Leible

Organizational structure of the University of Bayreuth

Prof. Dr. Walter Schober

Professor Dr. habil. Elmar Buchner

Prof. Dr. Theresa Knoblach is Professor of Engineering Geodesy and GIS for the Construction Industry at OTH Regensburg. She obtained her doctorate in the BayWISS Joint Academic Partnership Digitalisation at Technical University of Munich and Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt. Her research focuses on geoinformatics, engineering geodesy, digital photogrammetry, 3D modeling as well as BIM-based construction site monitoring and automated change detection. She also has many years of experience in research and development as well as in teaching.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Theresa Knoblach

Andreas Karg-Nowak completed a Master's degree in Medieval and Modern History, Legal History and Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2001. As scholarship holder of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, fellow at the International Max Planck Research School for Comparative Legal History and research associate at the Chair of Medieval and Modern Legal History and of Civil Law in Frankfurt, he carried out research on legal humanism in early modern France, before assuming the role of managing director of a research network on out-of-court and judicial dispute resolution in the Hessian programme LOEWE in 2012. During this time, Andreas Karg-Nowak also carried out his part-time studies in Science Marketing, which he successfully completed at Technnische Universität Berlin in 2014 with a Master of Science degree. After the research network was discontinued in 2015, he became Managing Director of newly founded BayWISS in 2016, at the time still on the Praterinsel. During his time as managing director, which lasted until late summer of 2017, the first six BayWISS Joint Academic Partnerships were founded. Having family ties to the Rhine-Main region, Andreas Karg-Nowak returned to Goethe University Frankfurt and accepted the position as Cooperation Manager of the strategic alliance of the Rhine-Main universities (RMU) – Goethe University Frankfurt, Technical University of Darmstadt and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz – a position he still holds today.

And, as every person has more than one side to them: In June 2016, Andreas Karg-Nowak published his first historical mystery novel.