About Talking Politics

Lead Organizer, University of Chicago

Wee Yang Soh is a doctoral candidate in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His research examines the intersection of new media, language, and politics, with a focus on how Korean digital media companies produce cultural content for global audiences. His work has also explored online memes and the adaptation of American conservative rhetoric in Singapore. Wee Yang is a co-founder of Talking Politics.

Lead Organizer, Brown University

Josh Babcock is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. He studies colonial images that persist beyond formal colonialism. Josh has carried out research at sites that range from Singapore, Southeast Asia, to the ghost town of Singapore, Michigan. His work has also explored imaginaries of local democracy in U.S. school boards and Singaporean civil society. He is one of the founders of Talking Politics.

University of Colorado Boulder

Mervenur Çetin is a second-year Ph.D. student in Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research centers on digital communication, artificial intelligence, and the political dimensions of speech, examining the nuanced dynamics between hate speech, free speech, and platform governance.

Brown University

Qiaoying Chen is a fourth-year student at Brown University studying English and anthropology. Their academic interests include law, surveillance, immigration, and activism. In their free time, you can find them browsing used bookstores or on a run.

Brown University

Eliza Ge is a medical anthropology student at Brown University. She is interested in rare diseases, care ethics, and the public healthcare system in China. By studying the everyday care experiences of patients and the policies surrounding rare diseases, her research seeks to uncover the tensions between universal healthcare and limited resources, public goods and private markets, as well as social solidarity and individual responsibility. Before joining Brown, she worked as a policy analyst at the Chinese Organization for Rare Disorders.

University of Chicago

Rob Gelles is a PhD Candidate in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Chicago and a Doctoral Fellow in Law and the Social Science at the American Bar Foundation. His research investigates the semiotic processes through which Conservative Legal Scholars develop and spread their preferred forms of legal interpretation, their knowledge practices, throughout the legal academy and profession.

Brown University

Sydney Giacalone is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Brown University. Her work bridges environmental anthropology, political ecology, and rural studies. Her current research focuses on multigenerational farmers and ranchers across the US who are transitioning away from conventional practices towards environmentally and socially reparative approaches. Giacalone is a graduate affiliate of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, a graduate coordinator for the Rural Women’s Studies Association, and a co-editor of Engagement.

University of Chicago

Sofia Guimaraes is a first-year student at the University of Chicago studying political science and human rights. She hopes to attend law school and focus primarily on international human rights law. On the side, she enjoys reading, crocheting, and practicing classical ballet.

University of Chicago

Le Vi Pham is a fourth-year PhD candidate in History at the University of Chicago. She studies gender and labor in the Japanese empire, examining the movement of Japanese women to work in the sex trade in the Korean peninsula during the colonial period.

Dartmouth College

Tyanna Slobe is a linguistic anthropologist and a postdoc in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth. Her dissertation studied student political participation in two socioeconomically segregated schools in Chile. Currently, Ty is writing a book on Chilean student movements and political meaning-making practices across linguistic, embodied, material, and temporal modalities.

University of Chicago

Jie (Iris) Wu is an anthropology student with a master's degree from the University of Chicago. Her recent research interests include publicity, performance, media and mediation, affect and aesthetics.

University of Chicago

Roberto Young is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His research explores the intersections of political economy, language revitalization, migration, and semiotics. His current project chronicles sociolinguistic experiences of Mayan-speaking migrants to evaluate displacement of Indigenous communities in Latin America and emergent discourses and communication practices.