Irina Kalinka

Irina is currently writing her dissertation on the digital imaginary of “User Democracy.” Here, she is asking what it would mean to imagine politics, including its practices and infrastructures of assembly and discourse, as a technological problem to be managed and solved in the name of smooth operability, better design choices, user-friendliness, and optimization under a framework of neoliberal reason 3.0 - and how to resist such reductionist conceptions of collective world-making. Her research is interdisciplinary and situates itself at the intersection of political, critical, and digital media theory.

She holds a B.A. in Politics and Human Rights from Bard College, N.Y., and an M.A. in English Literatures from Humboldt University, Berlin. Her previous work experience includes being a research assistant at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, developing digital climate science communication at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, and serving as an elected county-council representative for the Green Party in Teltow Fläming, Germany.