Dear RSF:
Please join us next Wednesday, October 21st at 11 in the library and on Zoom for a presentation by Visiting Researcher Rogers Brubaker, “Digital Infrastructures of Populism and Technocracy.”
Brubaker is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University, an MA in Social and Political Thought from the University of Sussex and a BA in Social Studies from Harvard University.
His last book, Gender Identity: The Career of a Category, was published in summer 2026 by Polity. An article on this subject was published recently in the inaugural issue of Theory and Social Inquiry. Brubaker has written widely on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, race, gender, populism, and – most recently – digital hyperconnectivity.
Brubaker’s RSF project is a new book that brings together literatures on populism, technocracy, digital governance, and digital infrastructures. The premise of the book is that digital infrastructures, including increasingly powerful forms of generative and agentic AI, are transforming politics and governance in fundamental ways by enabling and promoting new forms of populism and technology. These trends, previously seen as antithetical to one another, ar e increasingly seen as having a symbiotic relationship based on the perceived weakening efficacy of the two major political parties. He argues that digital technology provides the infrastructural foundation for this relationship.