Workshop
Brain as a Battleground in Cognitive Warfare. How Do We Defend It?
In this workshop, we explore what that means in practice — for individuals, for communities, and for democratic societies operating under sustained cognitive attack.
DATE
Apr 18, 2026
START TIME
1:30 p.m.
END TIME
2:30 p.m.
LOCATION
OCAD U Main Campus
Valeria Kovtun
Strategic Partnerships Lead at OpenMinds; Founder of Filter (national media literacy institution in Ukraine); Obama Scholar at Columbia University
Samantha Reusch
Executive Director, Apathy is Boring
Victoria Kuketz
2026 Obama Foundation Scholar
NATO's Allied Command Transformation has identified the cognitive domain as the emerging sixth battlefield, alongside land, air, sea, space, and cyber. Cognitive warfare is not just about fake news. It works by exploiting how our brains form trust, perceive threat, and decide what is worth defending.
In this workshop, we explore what that means in practice — for individuals, for communities, and for democratic societies operating under sustained cognitive attack. Drawing on operational experience from Ukraine's information battlefield and insights from behavioural and cognitive science, we will examine how democracies are being targeted, why lasting resilience has to rely not only on facts, and what whole-of-society defence looks like when the terrain is the human mind.
