Ann Mische

Hi! I am Ann Mische, Associate Professor of Sociology and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. My research focuses on communication, deliberation and leadership in social movements and democratic politics. I have examined these processes in my work on Brazilian youth politics during re-democratization, on anti-partisanship in recent protest waves, and on the role of futures thinking in transnational social change efforts. I have a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the Keough School of Global Affairs. I am a core faculty member of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and a faculty fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

In my first book, Partisan Publics (2009), I drew upon extensive ethnography and formal network analysis to explain the civic involvement of young activists through intersecting political networks. My second co-authored book, Measuring Culture (2020), takes the reader on a tour of the state of the art in measuring meaning, from discussions of neuroscience to computational social science. I am currently working on a third book, Futures in Contention, examining how cultural technologies for future-oriented deliberation are being used in transnational debates and interventions related to democratic governance, social and economic inequality, political violence, and environmental degradation.

My work has been published in sociological outlets such as the American Journal of Sociology (1998 & 2024), Theory and Society (2014), Poetics (2000), the Annual Review of Sociology (2013), and Sociological Forum (2009), among others. I have also contributed to several edited volumes, including Social Movements and Networks (2003), the Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis (2011), the Oxford Handbook of Social Movements (2015), and the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology (2018).