PROFILE
Dr. Laura Bullon-Cassis is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy. Her research examines how political cultures and imaginaries are reshaped in response to the climate crisis, focusing on how language, participation, and power configure collective action. She explores how political actors—including social movements, corporations, and tech elites—navigate, contest, and reimagine governance spaces in times of planetary upheaval. Her work pays particular attention to the shifting relationship between grassroots activism and global governance, analyzing how digital technologies mediate these transformations and influence multilateral institutions, activist practices, and public discourse.
Laura earned her Ph.D. (with Distinction) in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her dissertation examined how the sociocultural category of "youth" is strategically mobilized in UN climate summitry, analyzing how youth participation is framed, amplified, and instrumentalized in global climate governance. Her work engages with the politics of attention in multilateral climate diplomacy, from the staging of young activists to digital mobilization strategies.
She is currently working on several projects, including an ethnographic study on grassroots democratic renewal, with a particular focus on acts of civil disobedience in Paris, and an exploration of AI literacy and algorithmic governance in democratic decision-making. She was also the co-host of Who is Voting in 2024?, a podcast that investigated contemporary struggles over political voice in key elections worldwide.
Her work has been published in academic and media outlets, including the Journal of Youth Studies, Global Policy Journal, NEOS, OpenDemocracy and The Conversation. In 2024, she was named an Emerging Scholar by Global Perspectives (University of California Press). As a Team Leader and Writer for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, she regularly reports on UN environmental negotiations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN Climate Change Conferences, and the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development.
Laura has held roles in both academic and policy spaces, serving as Assistant Editor for the journal Public Culture and as a Board Member of the Children and Youth Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association. In 2023, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University and a Research Affiliate at the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University. In 2025, she is a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Social Movements at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.
Before her graduate studies, Laura worked with several UN agencies, including the UN Environment Programme, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, and the United Nations University. She holds an MSc in Global Politics and a BSc in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).