CONVENORS

I am a qualitative feminist researcher and sociologist. At the University of Manchester, I am a member of The Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives. My research interests include reactionary gender politics, digital (anti)feminisms, young people, and social media.

Miranda Iossifidis is a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University. Her research interests are to do with speculative populationist and ecofascist futures, reproductive and climate justice, and creative and collaborative methods.

Aurelien Mondon (he/him) is a Professor of Politics at the University of Bath and co-convenor of the Reactionary Politics Research Network. His research focuses predominantly on the mainstreaming of reactionary politics, focusing in particular on the role of elite discourse. His latest book Reactionary democracy: How racism and the populist far right became mainstream, co-written with Aaron Winter, was published in 2020 with Verso. In 2024, he co-edited The Ethics of Researching the Far Right with Antonia Vaughan, Joan Braune and Meghan Tinsley.

Alison Phipps is Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on gender and racial capitalism, feminist politics, and sexual violence. She is interested in ‘gender critical’ feminism as a reactionary formation and how that sits within broader contemporary right wing ecologies and histories of reactionary feminism. She is also interested in how ‘gender-critical’ feminists and other right-wing movements weaponise the issue of ‘women’s safety’ and imputations of sexual violence. Her work draws on and extends theoretical frameworks such as colonial feminism and the coloniality of gender, the afterlives of slavery, femo-nationalism and femocapitalism, and social reproduction theory.

I am an early-career researcher and lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt, working at the intersection of political science, sociology, and linguistics. I am currently working on my first book, Crisis Discourse of the Radical Right, for the Cambridge University Press Series in Critical Discourse Studies. My research interests include critical discourse analysis, crisis discourse, far-right populism, visual populism, and the mainstreaming of the far right.

Dr Henrique Tavares Furtado is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UWE. He writes on the memory of authoritarianism in Latin America and reactionary ontologies in Political Theory and International Relations. He is the author of Politics of Impunity: Torture, the Armed Forces and the Failure of Transitional Justice in Brazil (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and numerous articles in the journals Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology, Review of International Studies, Critical Security Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Critical Military Studies, The Journal for the Study of Radicalism and others.

Aaron Winter is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Director of the Centre for Alternatives to Social and Economic Inequalities (CASEI) at Lancaster University. His research is on the far right focusing on racism, terrorism and mainstreaming. He is co-editor of Researching the Far Right: Theory, Method and Practice (Routledge 2020), and co-author, with Aurelien Mondon, of Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream (Verso 2020). He has published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Identities, Journal of Political Ideologies, and Sociological Research Online, and is co-editor of Identities and the MUP series Racism, Resistance and Social Change.

I am a first-year PhD student at the University of Bath with a research focus on anti-populism: discourses which seek to defend the status quo from contestation by demonising challenges to it as irresponsibly “populist”. As such, I am interested in two reactionary consequences of these discourses. Firstly, the ways in which they close down opportunities to contest neoliberal hegemony and, secondly, the euphamisation of far-right politics as merely “populist”. Within the Reactionary Politics Research Network I am hoping to explore how reaction operates at the core of the liberal-democratic mainstream.