EDITORIAL BOARD

Daniel Balinhas is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Social Psychology at Limerick University. He got his PhD in Political Psychology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His main research interests are focused on inter-group processes and conflict, political polarization, and the study of social forces producing, developing, and sustaining group-based inequalities.

Elsa Bengtsson Meuller (she/they) is a Part Time Lecturer at the University of Southampton; a Fellow at the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism; and an Editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Their research is based in feminist theory and politics, and takes a critical look at online technologies and violence. Elsa’s PhD project – conducted in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths, University of London – examined the politics surrounding misogynist incels, including their enablers. In general, their research interests are in feminist theory, politics of violence, the tech sector, online technology, misogyny, structures and systems of (political) power, and pop culture.

Briar Dickey is a doctoral researcher with interests in reactionary discourses, gender, digital politics and popular culture. His work to date explores far-right gender and sexuality politics, transphobic discourses, reactionary gender ontologies, and political misinformation online. His current PhD research centres the role of the fictional content of video games in far-right gender politics. This project explores the role of games as ludic, narrative-driven fictions with a distinctively gendered historical and (sub)cultural positioning, as well as the broader role of fiction and pop culture in far right metapolitical strategy, gender construction, world-building, and community.

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.

Anthony Kelly is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin. He was awarded a PhD in Media and Communications by the London School of Economics and Political Science for a thesis examining the discursive dimensions of affective polarisation during the 2016 US presidential election. Focusing on the antagonistic practices of audiences, his research employs a blend of qualitative and computational methods. Anthony’s current project, funded by Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland, explores how the social media audiences of reactionary political influencers position themselves as stakeholders in a platformised reactionary media ecosystem.

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.

Brett Nicholls is a senior lecturer in Media, Film, and Communication at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He interrogates media and politics through poststructuralist discourse analysis and critical theory. His current work takes an historical view of reactionary politics in (mostly) the Australian and New Zealand contexts and considers how this politics is ideologically formed and how it changes over time. He specifically looks at long active far-right groups such as The Australian League of Rights. The research then zooms in on how reactionary ideology becomes part of mainstream political discourse.

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.

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.