Dr. Laura Bullon Cassis is a scholar of climate politics, media, and democratic change. Her research examines how political cultures and institutions respond to crisis, with a particular focus on youth politics, climate governance, and digital media. She also studies how communication infrastructures and sociotechnical systems mediate political struggle by redistributing attention, authority, and political imagination.
Her first book, based on her PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, completed with distinction, analyzes the symbolic politics of youth in United Nations climate summitry. Drawing on long term ethnographic research, it shows how youth have become central figures in the communicative politics of climate change, and how visibility and moral authority often substitute for political influence within global diplomacy.
Her current research includes ethnographic work on grassroots democratic renewal and civil disobedience in Paris, alongside projects on AI literacy, data infrastructures, and algorithmic mediation in democratic decision making. Across these strands, she examines how emerging technologies and political experimentation reshape participation, accountability, and the conditions under which collective futures are imagined.
Her writing has appeared in scholarly and public venues including the Journal of Youth Studies, Global Policy Journal, Global Perspectives, NEOS, OpenDemocracy, and The Conversation. She also reports on multilateral environmental negotiations as a team leader and writer with the International Institute for Sustainable Development, covering the IPCC, UN Climate Change Conferences, and the High-Level Political Forum.
She has held visiting fellowships at the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University, the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and Sciences Po. She has taught at New York University and Pratt Institute, served as Assistant Editor of Public Culture, and was named an Emerging Scholar by Global Perspectives in 2024.
Before entering academia, she worked in policy and research roles with several United Nations bodies, including UNEP, UN-Habitat, 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.
Contact: laura.bullon-cassis@graduateinstitute.ch
Laura Bullon-Cassis 