Muhammad Ammar is a doctoral student of Comparative Politics in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers–New Brunswick. His research, which has appeared in Peace Review and the Journal of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, seeks to explore the mediatized performances of populist communication in South Asia. Ammar holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bennington College, where he had a triple focus in Political Science, Theatre, and Literary Translation.

Chia-Lin Kao is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers–New Brunswick. Her research interests include the political communication of authoritarian governments and diaspora politics, with a regional focus on China and post-Soviet regions. She employs mixed quantitative and qualitative approaches, particularly text-as-data methods, to assess national narrative variations and their impacts in China and post-Soviet countries.

What the Heck is Populism?

Everyone seems to be talking about it, but have you ever wondered: What the heck is populism? As academics keep debating its definition, the proliferation of populism continues to threaten the foundations of democracy across the world. Our project is an educational effort to demystify this highly contested concept for a broad audience: students, researchers, activists, journalists, and, above all, democratic citizens. Drawing upon recent technological advancements, we hope to build a digital civic space which attempts not to create partisan publics, but to break the cycles of conceptual muddiness that hinder healthy engagement with democratic institutions.