The Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles has announced the 2021-22 class of Berggruen Fellows.

Launched in 2015 in partnership with the University of Southern California's Dornsife Center on Science, Technology and Public Life, the program supports research with the potential to shape human society while promoting both academic and cultural exchange and offers scholars flexible periods of work and study in both the United States and China.

The seventh cohort of Berggruen Fellows includes sixteen researchers working on research related to the program's four themes: the Future of Capitalism, the Future of Democracy, the Transformations of the Human, and Geopolitics and Globalization. This year's fellows include Alden Young, an assistant professor of African American Studies and a member of the International Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, who will examine the work of Sudanese intellectuals and their ambitions for connections in the contemporary moment by looking at climate change awareness, mitigation, and adaptation in countries flanking the Red Sea; Devika Dutt, a research fellow at the Global Development Policy Center at Boston University and co-founder of Diversifying and Decolonising Economics, whose work is focused on the political economy associated with global reserve currency status and the domestic macroeconomic and social policy trade-offs that accompany it; Johanna Hoffman, an urbanist working in the space between design, planning, fiction, and futures and co-founder and director of planning at Design for Adaptation, who will explore speculative futures scenarios that can be used to enhance participation and collaboration in urban planning and policy development; and Stuart Candy, co-creator of the game The Thing From The Future, who will conduct research to better understand how people envision alternative futures and how such imagining could constructively affect collective choice and  strengthen communities.

"As we continue to fight COVID-19, this new cohort of fellows will show us how to imagine better social systems and new, useful ways of thinking about our world," said Berggruen Institute vice president of programs Nils Gilman. "While the pandemic accelerates the twenty-first century's great transformations, the Berggruen Fellowship program enables the kind of foundational thinking and generative discussions that humanity needs."

For a complete list of Berggruen Fellows, see the Berggruen Institute website.