Barış Şahin

Barış Şahin studied social sciences and German language and literature at the University of Cologne. He complemented his studies with cultural and religious studies at the University of Education Weingarten and Bilgi University in Istanbul and is currently finishing his Master’s degree in the Teachers Education Program at the University of Cologne. In his research and activist work, he focuses on the various transnational and transcultural discourses of identity, racism, and ideologies of inequality in German society. As a scholarship holder of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, alumnus of the German-American Fulbright Commission (The Ohio State University, Seminar on “Diversity and Inclusion in the Classroom”), and the DialoguePerspectives, a Leo Baeck Foundation program, he was able to contribute and expand his academic and political proficiency on an international level, with the aim of making a significant contribution to European understanding and cooperation, to strengthening and defending civil society, and to shaping a plural, democratic, antiracist and solidary Europe. The experiences Mr. Şahin has gained in the course of his engagement and work have made him an expert of a new, society-oriented intercultural-worldview dialogue. He is active as a speaker, interlocutor, and advisor to civil society organizations and NGOs engaged in shaping a plural society. As head of various state and federal projects funded by the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth and the Ministry for Children, Family, Refugees and Integration of North Rhine-Westphalia, he has helped shape new social discourses, such as on the topic of identity formation among adolescents with a migration background in Germany.