How to create functioning dialogue? Vivian Valencia, an elected member of the Advisory Council, shares her thoughts about the Global Diplomacy Lab. For her, inclusive dialogues are happening in situations where “individuals from different disciplines, viewpoints, sectors and parts of society” engage with one another. Vivian reflects upon the future development of GDL as a platform of innovation and collective creation. For her, the GDL is currently one of the few examples having “a discourse that is not paralysed but energised by diversity”. In the article, Vivian also explains why she considers the GDL to be “by definition without definition”.
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Dr Vivian Valencia is an interdisciplinary scientist who utilises perspectives and methods from the natural and social sciences to investigate the socio-ecological processes that shape agricultural landscapes and food systems and the consequences for food security, ecosystems and biodiversity. She is currently a Research Fellow at Wageningen University, where she will become an Assistant Professor in the autumn of 2019. She earned her PhD from Columbia University in 2015.
Dr Valencia’s research and professional career have been supported by a National Geographic Early Career Grant, a PRIME Fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Fellowship of the European Commission and a Gates Millennium Scholarship, among others.
Dr Valencia is active in the policy sphere, where she aims to close the gap between science and policy-making. She is a former member of the GDL’s Advisory Council; a BMW Responsible Leader; an alumna of several programmes of the Bosch Foundation; an alumna of the Managing Global Governance Training Programme of the German Development Institute (DIE); and an alumna of the “International Futures” programme of Training for International Diplomats of the German Federal Foreign Office.
