2023-2024 Mentees

Sara Abdulla (she/her)

Sara Abdulla is a PhD/JD student in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University. She previously worked in researching technology development and policy at Georgetown University's CSET. She is interested in the interplay between technology, antifeminisms, and scientific communication.

Maisnam Arnapal (any pronouns)

Maisnam Arnapal is a Ph.D. student in Feminist Studies with a designated emphasis in Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research looks at one of South Asia's longest-running conflicts in Manipur located at the India-Myanmar-China borderland through a feminist queer lens. He studies how the decades-long militarization and insurgency in Manipur institutionalize gender and sexual regimes against the backdrop of the tension between India's post-colonial racial violence and the ethnonationalist aspirations of the Manipuris.

Maisnam belongs to the Indigenous Meitei community. Also a publicly engaged scholar, their upcoming project is a documentary film on transmen life-making in times of conflict co-produced with a queer youth organization, Ya_All.ation.

Isabelle Canaan (she/her)

Isabelle Canaan is an attorney who received her J.D. from Columbia University in 2021. Isabelle also received an MPhil from the University of Oxford in 2018, where she wrote her thesis on ACT for America, the largest anti-Muslim grassroots group in the United States. Isabelle received a B.A. in Political Science with honors from the University of Chicago in 2016. Her research centers on the intersection of law, religion, social movements, and civil rights.

Melissa Cárcamo (she/her/ella)

Melissa Cárcamo is a first-gen Nicaraguan graduate student at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in the Women Gender and Sexuality Studies. Within her program, she works as a graduate assistant at the Owls Care Health Promotion office as their Masculinity and Interpersonal Violence Expert. In her role she regularly does presentations on Sex Ed, Violence Prevention, and Multicultural Masculinities Studies. Outside of being funded by her program, Melissa is funded as a Study of Americas Fellow researching machismo and Latin American masculinities.

Prior to starting FAU, Melissa was born and lived in Miami until moving to Tallahassee to attend Florida State University (FSU). At FSU, she received a Bachelors in Women Studies with a minor in Hispanic Marketing and Communications and was invited to speak at Ted Talk “Redefining Masculinity: Men, Masculinity, and Machismo.” Now outside of FAU, Melissa interns at Aids for Domestic Abuse (AVDA) and has kicked off becoming a Latina Feminist content creator on Instagram: @Feminist.Insights . Check her out!

Sophy Daneault (she/her)

Sophy Daneault is a doctoral student in Communication and Media at Loughborough University. She holds a MA from King’s College London’s War Studies department, and a MSc from University College London in Countering Organised Crime and Terrorism. Her research focusses on news media portrayals of terrorism, particularly white/male supremacist inspired terrorism. She is interested in the news media’s reproduction of white and male supremacist social structures, and how this impacts portrayals of the far-right.

Kasandra Dodd

Kasandra Dodd, MSW, LICSW, LCSW, CPM, is a fourth-year doctoral candidate, teaching and research assistant in the School of Social Work at the University of Georgia. Ms. Dodd is a licensed clinical social worker with sixteen years of child welfare experience where she acquired a wealth of knowledge within various roles in the child welfare field. Ms. Dodd’s research interest involves child welfare reform related to human trafficking concerns within the foster care system, minority & gender issues, feminist theoretical frameworks, and qualitative research methods.

Kat Fuller

Kat Fuller is a graduate sociology student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Fuller’s research interests include virtual environment, masculinities, and anti-feminism, especially as they connect to far-right terrorism. Fuller is interested in examining how hegemonic masculinity conducts actions in culture and social movements. The radicalization and polarization within social media are growing issues as people risk themselves by the disadvantages of technology, such as the filter bubble and attention economy. Fuller is working on a few projects focusing on the far-right movement and transphobia, especially regarding the spread of misinformation and disinformation in social media.

During free time, Fuller enjoys reading books and watching movies, fiction or nonfiction.

Katherine Furl (she/her)

Katherine (Katie) Furl is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a graduate research affiliate at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life (CITAP). Her research employs qualitative and computational methods to understand how themes in the rhetoric and discourse of male supremacist online communities perpetuate social inequalities, and in parallels between themes in male supremacist communities and the broader social world. You can follow Katie on Twitter @KatherineFurl.

Olivia Gellar (she/her)

Olivia Gellar is a PhD Student in the department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research looks at the rhetoric of opposition voices, paying particular attention to knowledge construction and recruitment in far-right spaces online to understand the way particular groups gain and maintain power. Her work has spanned topics such as Anti-Vaccination Conspiracies, the QAnon movement, Shooter manifestos and insurrection live-streams. Her work has been published in Communication journals such as Rhetoric & Public Affairs and Communication and Democracy.

Olivia's work with IRMS tackles questions of whiteness, fear, and extremism in Incel forums that are overwhelmingly non-violent to bring attention to the ways these groups maintain their following.

Rina James (they/them)

Rina James is a doctoral candidate in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. Their research interests lie at the intersection of gender, social movements, and digital culture, with a current emphasis on understanding how ideological variation within the manosphere influences both radicalization processes and the outcomes of men's participation in online male supremacist spaces. Their dissertation work maps user trajectories across male supremacist Reddit communities, and aims to identify individual and community-level factors that drive differential participation within these movements.

Simone Long

Simone Long is working towards a PhD in Sociology at the University of Exeter - primarily based in the Centre for Computational Social Science (C2S2) - and holds an MRes in Social Research and a BSc in Criminology. Using a combination of computational and qualitative content analysis (in addition to other quantitative methods), their current research focuses on the nature of ideological cross-pollination between the online manosphere and the alt-right, exploring thematic similarities in user-generated discourse on extremist platforms. In addition to hypothesising the implications of these findings regarding the nature of the on and offline self - and the consequences of this regarding supremacist radicalisation - she also strives to provide empirical support for the conceptual treatment of these loosely connected networks of interest groups as biotopes forming self-sustaining and ever-evolving virtual supremacist ecosystems that, while somewhat ideologically distinct, substantially overlap and influence one another as in the natural environment.

Elsa Bengtsson Meuller (she/they)

Elsa Bengtsson Meuller is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths, University of London. Elsa holds an MSc in Comparative Political Thought and a BA in Politics from SOAS, University of London. Elsa’s research focuses on antifeminist and male supremacist politics and explores feminist approaches to the politics and culture of cyberspace and security. In their doctoral research, Elsa develops a feminist methodology for researching antifeminist online cultures through the use and theorisation of emotions and affect.

Robin O’Hanlon (she/her)

Robin is a doctoral student in criminal justice at the City University of New York Graduate Center housed at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She works as a research assistant and librarian. Her research interests include male supremacist violence, supremacist narrative strategies of scientification, and crimes of power. Her research on misogynistic extremism has appeared in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse. Robin holds a Master of Information Studies from University of Toronto and Master of Arts in Criminal Justice from John Jay, CUNY.

Meadhbh Park (she/her)

Meadhbh Park is a MA graduate of Peace and Conflict Studies from University College Dublin, Ireland. Her research interests include masculinity and its relationship to conflict, militaries, and political extremism. She has previously written papers on western foreign fighters in ISIS and militarised masculinity as conveyed through the medium of film in the post 9/11 era. She is currently working on studying the link between masculinity and the far-right and wrote her MA thesis on hypermasculinity and the rhetoric of Gavin McInnes. She is interested in looking at how masculinity is framed in the ‘alt-right’ and how examination of the ‘alt-right’ through the lens of masculinity could bring a deeper understanding as to why men are drawn to the movement. She also volunteers at Life After Hate, an organisation dedicated to helping people leave far-right extremism. 

Heidi Sampson

Heidi Sampson works in communications and public relations for a religious, social justice nonprofit. She also works as an adjunct in the English department at Minnesota State University (MNSU), Mankato. Heidi holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and a Bachelor of Arts in Gender and Women’s Studies from MNSU, a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in Poetry and Nonprofit Leadership from MNSU, and a Master of Arts and Ph.D. in Leadership and Change from Antioch University.

Kate Scott

Kate Scott is a PhD candidate in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her current research focuses on deradicalisation within the manosphere, specifically examining the processes that enable or hinder individuals in disengaging from extreme Red Pill Communities. She is interested in the intersection of violent extremism, radicalisation, and gender within digital spaces. Prior to their doctoral studies, Kate completed their honours at the University of Sydney, focusing on online hate speech, U.S. security, and reproductive rights.

AJ Siegel

AJ Siegel is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte pursuing a BA in writing, rhetoric & digital studies and a BS in psychology. Their previous research has focused on alt-right memetic communication, trolling practices, and disengagement efforts from the Red Pill. AJ's current research investigates rehabilitation efforts from manosphere ideology within online support groups. They are also interested in investigating digital radicalization strategies from a digital rhetorics perspective to understand how these supremacist ideologies are able to spread across various online platforms and spaces. Outside of this research, AJ has experience in journalism, copy editing, writing instruction, and media literacy.

Anda Solea (she/her)

Anda Solea is a doctoral researcher and teaching fellow at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Portsmouth UK, and former Enrichment student at The Alan Turing Institute UK. Her research examines the presence and spread of misogynistic narratives perpetuated by incels (involuntary celibates) on TikTok and YouTube. She aims to identify the mechanisms that drive engagement to such content and to raise awareness about the role mainstream social media platforms play in the spread of harmful ideologies responsible for the perpetuation of problematic gender stereotypes and violence against women. She is particularly interested in the role of social media platforms in disseminating misogynistic and extremist beliefs, and how the popularisation and exposure of such beliefs influence the mainstreaming of misogyny and incel tropes. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to research by combining social psychology, digital criminology and computational methods to study online behaviour and online harms.

Maria N. Scaptura (she/her)

Maria N. Scaptura received her MS in sociology at Virginia Tech in 2019, where she is earning her doctorate. Her research interests are masculinity, gender, and crime. These areas converge in her thesis project, in which she examines the impact of masculinity threat on attitudes toward guns and aggressive fantasies.

Her current project is on former incels (“involuntary celibates”). She analyzes an r/AskReddit thread that asks ex-incels about their experiences and what drew them to the movement, finding that while respondents do not necessarily identify as incels anymore, they still perpetuate misogyny, objectify women, and blame others for their involvement in the incel community.

Brigitte Temel (she/none)

Brigitte Temel holds a bachelor degree in Psychology, Sociology and a Master Degree in Gender Studies. Since 2020 she is working as a researcher at Institute of Conflict Research (IKF) in Vienna. Main research topics are violence against women, antifeminism and Gender & Queer Studies. Currently Brigitte is working on a study on Incels in Austria.

Sara Tyberg

Sara Tyberg is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research broadly focuses on the causes and consequences of gendered violence, and how orientations to masculinity inform acts of violence. In her MA thesis, Sara examined racial differences in mass shooter outcomes, exploring the persisting relationship between white masculinity and suicide in the case of mass shootings. In another project, Sara examines how male supremacist ideologies permeate everyday romantic expectations and interpersonal interactions related to dating and intimacy through the concept of “romantic entitlement.”

Reed Van Schenck (Any pronouns)

Reed Van Schenck is Teaching Fellow and Ph.D Candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Their research applies rhetorical criticism to understand reactionary networks on and of the Internet.

Anna Wainwright (they/she/Anna)

Anna Wainwright is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Additionally, they have worked within the Gender and Sexuality Studies department and plan to receive a Graduate Feminist Emphasis. Their research interests include intimate relationships, gender, culture/agency, and interdisciplinary methods. Specifically, their thesis grapples with remnants of monogamous culture within practices of non-monogamy. Their dissertation work will continue to engage with the tension between transgressing and reproducing norms within various relationship practices.

Mya Ward (she/her)

Mya Ward is a second-year Anthropology student at Chaffey College. As an Anthropology major, she is focusing her studies on the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean. As an IRMS Mentee, she is interested in studying the algorithmic and rhetorical forces behind the diffusion of male supremacist ideologies into the minds of young men and boys. Her work focuses especially on niche male supremacist communities online.