Democracy Disrupted

Guest Bio: Suzanne van Geuns is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation project is an ethnographic investigation of three overlapping online subcultures that use the internet to launch right-wing futures: conservative Christianity, antifeminism, and white nationalism. All three of these fields are characterized by the conviction that they are salvaging beleaguered truths about reality from feminist/leftist/multiculturalist suppression. This project asks how these subcultures connect such transcendental truths to the material world, investigating what techniques are brought together online to make a white, rigidly gendered, and/or biblical world not only feel desirable, but also tangibly real. Mapping the online infrastructures of right-wing aspiration, this project renders the futures they generate debatable in new ways.

Guest Bio: Kirsten Han is the Editor-in-Chief of New Naratif, a news and research site dedicated to covering Southeast Asia in all its complexity, and "advocating for and modelling ethical, moral, and progressive values rooted in the Southeast Asian context." Kirsten has written extensively about social justice, human rights, politics and democracy for outlets including the The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Asia Times and many others. Kirsten is also a founding member of abolitionist group We Believe in Second Chances which advocates for an end to the death penalty in Singapore.

Guest Bio: Kate Gage spent eight years working in the Obama Administration both in the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy as a Senior Policy Advisor and at the U.S. Agency for International Development. At USAID she helped create the U.S. Global Development Lab to develop and scale global development and humanitarian technologies. She is also Co-founder and Executive Director of Lab 736, which embeds experienced engineers and designers in state level Democratic political organizations. Kate was the Chief Operations Officer of the March for Science in 2017, and Chief of Staff for the March for Our Lives in 2018, working with the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where 17 students were killed in February 2018. Kate is also a founding partner for The Movement Cooperative.