Keynote Speakers
Guy Standing
Guy Standing is an economist, with a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He is Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London, and was a professor at SOAS and the Universities of Bath and Monash. Before that, he was Director of the ILO’s Socio-Economic Security Programme, and Director of Research for President Mandela’s Labour Market Reform Commission. He has been a consultant for many international bodies and governments, and has been a speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
He is co-founder and honorary co-president of BIEN, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and the UK Academy of Social Sciences. He has conducted basic income pilots in several countries, and is advising the governments of Wales and Catalonia on ongoing pilots.
His latest book is The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea (2022), which the Financial Times made one of its Books of the Year. Others include Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now (2020); Plunder of the Commons (2019); Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (2017); Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India (2015); and The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (fourth edition 2021).
Toru Yamamori
Toru Yamamori is a professor at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, and a member of the ‘UBI and gender’ research team at Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies, Germany. He works at the intersection of feminist economics, history and philosophy of economics, and oral history. He contributes to international journals such as Cambridge Journal of Economics, Journal of Economic Methodology, and Ethics and Social Welfare. His works won the Kapp Prize from the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (2017), and the Basic Income Studies Essay prize (2014 and 2021).
Louise Haagh
Professor Louise Haagh (University of York) works in comparative institutional political economy, and problems relating to modern economic transformations, economic justice, human development, and democratisation of the state. Her most recent book – The Case for Universal Basic Income – showcased in the Stanford Social innovation Review, sets out her position on basic income. Louise has worked with a range of NGOs and charities and has consulted for a number of global institutions, including the World Bank, Council of Europe and the WHO. She was co-chair and chair of BIEN between 2014-2019, and member of the executive committee since 2004.
Michael Tubbs
Michael Tubbs is the Founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income (MGI) and End Poverty in California (EPIC) and Special Advisor to California Governor Gavin Newsom for Economic Mobility and Opportunity.
Tubbs served as the seventy-ninth mayor of Stockton, California, his hometown, from 2017-2021. He became the youngest Mayor of any major city at 26 years old and the city’s first African-American Mayor. Under his leadership, the National Civic League named Stockton an “All-America City” in 2017 and 2018. Stockton was named the second most fiscally healthy city in California and recognized as one of the most fiscally healthy cities in the nation.
Building off his first-of-its-kind guaranteed income pilot (SEED) and rooted in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, Mayor Tubbs and the Economic Security Project founded Mayors for a Guaranteed Income in June 2020. MGI brings Mayors together to advocate for a guaranteed income to ensure all Americans have an income floor.
Sarath Davala
Sarath Davala is an independent sociologist based in Hyderabad, India, and is currently the Chair of the Basic Income Earth Network that works in about 45 countries. He was a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore for a while, and in 2010 he led the Madhya Pradesh Basic Income Pilot Study. He is the co-author of the book: “Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India“. He is currently co-directing another basic income pilot project with waste collectors in five slums of Hyderabad.
Scott Santens
Acknowledged by Andrew Yang in his book The War on Normal People as one of those who helped shape his thinking, and described by historian Rutger Bregman as “by far, the most effective basic income activist out there,” Scott Santens has lived with a crowdfunded basic income since 2016 and has been researching and advocating for UBI around the world since 2013. He’s the author of Let There Be Money, is Senior Advisor to Humanity Forward, serves on the board of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity, and is the editor of Basic Income Today – a daily UBI news hub.
Almaz Zelleke
Almaz Zelleke (PhD Harvard University) is Professor of Practice in Political Science at NYU Shanghai, where she teaches political theory, feminist social theory, and comparative political economy. Her articles on basic income, distributive justice, welfare policy, and feminist political theory have been published in Política y Sociedad, Basic Income Studies, Political Quarterly, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Policy and Politics, Review of Social Economy, and Journal of Socio-Economics. She is currently writing a book on a feminist perspective on basic income. For more information, visit almazzelleke.com.
Annie Miller
Annie Miller is a retired academic economist, lecturer, author and BI advocate, with particular interests in the definition of BI, poverty and redistribution, labour supply, the gender effects of BI, and particularly the academic foundation in which, ideally, BI advocacy should be rooted.
She is a founding member of BIEN, and was Chair of the UK’s Citizen’s Basic Income Trust between 2001-23.
She has contributed to many conferences both in the UK and abroad, including as a keynote speaker. Her latest book is Basic Income: A Short Guide (2023).
Her home is in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Aida Martinez Tinaut
Aida Martinez Tinaut obtained a joint bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM)). She got her master’s degree in Political Analysis and Institutional Consulting from the University of Barcelona (UB), and also obtained a postgraduate degree in Data Analysis for political analysis and public management (UB). She has worked in the public and private spheres in the assessment of public policies, the processing and analysis of data and the preparation of analysis reports based on quantitative and qualitative methods. She is currently working as a data analyst at the Office of the Pilot project to implement the Universal Basic Income at the Catalan government.
Jurgen De Wispelaere
Jurgen De Wispelaere is a political theorist turned public policy scholar, specializing in the political economy of basic income. He is Visiting Professor at the Götz Werner Chair of Economic Policy & Constitutional Theory, University of Freiburg. He has published extensively on the politics of basic income and is the co-editor of four volumes as well as the Founding Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Basic Income Studies. He is currently working on two research projects: exploring the policy impact of the recent wave of basic income experiments and examining the role of basic income in emergency or crisis situations.
Jorge Pinto
Jorge Pinto holds a Master’s degree in environmental engineering and a PhD in social and political philosophy. His research is focused on the intersection between republican and green political theories. In particular, how a green basic income can support a post-productivist economy that strengthens republican freedom.
He is the author of the book A Liberdade dos Futuros (Tinta-da-China, 2021) and co-author of the book Rendimento Básico Incondicional – Uma defesa da Liberdade (Edições 70, 2019), a book focusing on basic income and which has won the 1st prize for best essay from the Portuguese Society of Philosophy.
Philippe Van Parijs
Philippe Van Parijs is professor at the University of Louvain and Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence). He was a regular visiting professor at Harvard University and the University of Oxford. He convened the 1986 conference that saw the creation of BIEN, now the Basic Income Earth Network, and chairs its Advisory Board. His books include Real Freedom for All (Oxford 1995; in Korean: Humanitas 2016), What’s Wrong with a Free Lunch? (Beacon Press, 2001), and Basic Income. A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy (with Y. Vanderborght, Harvard 2017, in Korean: New Wave Media 2018).
Roberto Merrill
Roberto Merrill is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Minho, where he coordinates the MA in Political Philosophy. He is also a researcher at the Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society (CEPS), where he co-coordinates the UBIEXP project on UBI experiments (website here: https://ubiexperiments.weebly.com/). He is Associate Researcher at CEVIPOF (Sciences Po-Paris). He published in 2022 Basic Income Experiments: A Critical Examination of their Goals, Contexts, and Methods (Palgrave Macmillan). He is currently working on a book manuscript on the economic costs and benefits of a UBI.
Nam Hoon Kang
Nam Hoon Kang received his PhD in Economics from Seoul National University and worked at the Department of Economics, Hanshin University. He co-founded the Basic Income Korea Network in 2009 and served as its chairman. He is the author of The Economics of Basic Income (2019), Political Reform and Basic Income (2020) and The Political Economy of the Information Revolution (2002). He participated in the creation of candidate Lee Jae-myung’s basic income pledge for the 2022 presidential election. He is currently the policy director of the Basic Society Committee of Democratic Party and chair of Basic Society. Recently, he has been conducting research on the topics of carbon neutrality and basic income.
Min Geum
Min Geum is the director of the Institute for Political & Economic Alternatives. Having studied law in Germany, he has been exploring political philosophy for a long time, which has led him to publish a book in Korean on the political philosophy of basic income. The book is titled “Everyone’s Share for Everyone” (2020). His recent interests span a wide range of fields, including digital capitalism, energy transition, basic income, and common wealth funds. In particular, he has been working on drawing implications for basic income from the political economy of artificial intelligence. He was one of the founders of the Basic Income Korean Network (BIKN) in 2009 and is currently a board member of BIKN.
Jeonghee Seo
Jeonghee Seo is a professor of social welfare at Kunsan National University and director of the Institute for Basic Income Studies at the Basic Income Korean Network(BIKN). She leads research on analyzing the effects of basic income policies (Gyeonggi-do Youth Basic Income) and experiments (the Comma Project of BIKN, Pandong Elementary School Children’s Basic Income, Busan Youth Basic Income Experiment) in Korea, and is responsible for writing the Basic Income Korean Network’s Basic Income Roadmap (book “Welfare State with Basic Income”). Her theoretical works include the book Basic Income is Coming and the articles “The Meaning and Limitations of Basic Capital from the Perspective of Basic Income Theory,” “Building the hierarchy of its constituent features and discerning the schemes: Some implications of the consideration of basic income definition toward the strategy for its realization,” and so on.
Hyosang Ahn
Hyosang Ahn is chair of Basic Income Korean Network (BIKN) and vice-president of Institute for Political and Economic Alternatives, an independent research institute based on Seoul, Korea. He was chair of Executive Committee of BIEN Congress 2016. He has been interested in history of basic income idea, climate change and basic income, the commons and wrote a few articles including “Trajectory of Basic Income Idea and Its Prospect in South Korea”, “Building the Hierarchy of Its Constituent Features and Discerning the Schemes”, “How Basic Income Expands the Commons. He also translated some books including Basic Income and Plunder of the Commons both by Guy Standing.
Hye-in Yong
Hye-in Yong is a member of the 21st National Assembly of the Republic of Korea and the Standing Representative of the Basic Income Party. She was a founding member of the Basic Income Party which was founded on January 19, 2020 with the slogan “600,000 won per month no matter who you are” and she was elected in April of the same year.
Her main legislative activities include proposing the Basic Income Acts on Carbon Tax, Land Tax and the Korean version of the Windfall Tax Act and she is the Chief Researcher of the National Assembly Basic Income Research Forum.
In National Assembly she is a Member of the National Assembly Committee on Public Administration and Security, Gender Equality and Family and served as a Member of the Special Investigative Committee to find out the truth and prevent a recurrence about the Itaewon Tragedy.
