Dissertation Title: DIY and Dissidence: How online countermedia produce new political subjectivities

Committee: Andreas Glaeser (chair), Lis Clemens, Marco Garrido, Susan Gal (Anthropology)

In my research, I employ qualitative methods to investigate the interconnections between culture, new media, and politics. My dissertation explores how engagement with alternative online news infrastructures configures participation in contemporary populist mobilizations in Germany. Over an extensive period of two and a half years, I observed activists navigating successive political mobilizations, including anti-refugee campaigns, anti-lockdown protests, and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The dissertation posits that activists, in their interactions with these online media sources, adopt distinctive epistemic styles that play a pivotal role in determining how activists assimilate information and subsequently choose to engage, opt out, or refrain from involvement in a particular instance of mobilization. In other projects, I have explored how evolving relationships with expertise have prompted changing responses by the German center-right to the emergence of far-right political parties post-1945, as well as the role of secularism in shaping attitudes toward Muslim minorities in France and Germany.