Roni Küppers

Hi!

I am a PhD researcher in the Department of Methodology at LSE
and a Fellow of the La Caixa Foundation. You can check my
institutional page here. Previously I worked as a research assitant
at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), and previously in a
project on social solidarity in contexts of high cultural diversity
commissioned by the Barcelona City Council to the Centre
for International Relations (CIDOB).

My work is structured around an overarching fascination with the links between collective identity and political participation, the way they feed into each other, and how these links explain our capacity to imagine/enact political change. The broader objective is to understand and address the challenge of materialising the fundamental human capacity to bond, coalesce, and collaborate, in a context of increasing social complexity and mounting global challenges. At present, I develop this work in the areas of nationalism, peoplehood/populism, and gender.

At an empirical level, this work has taken shape in both quantitative and qualitative projects concerned with understanding how populism is grounded in collective identities, and what implications these identities have more broadly for political change.

At a theoretical level, building on my empirical research, I engage with theories on the changing relations of self and society in (post)modern times. I explore how their assumptions compare to empirical data, and how their normative proposals might enable/hamper social and political solidarity.

At a methodological level, I explore how methodological innovation can tackle current challenges in the field and bring closer empirical and theoretical debates. In this line, I am particularly interested in how our methods impact our ontologies of society and viceversa, and therefore the theories we build. In my most recent paper, for instance, I build on original data to propose the debate on the causes of populism is conceptually biased, structuring the academic conversation itself in a way that hampers our capacity to understand its causes.

You can download my CV here.