Esther Feeken is a research assistant and PhD student at the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research since September 2023. After her Bachelor's degree in Cultural Studies and Political Science at the University of Bremen, she did her Master's degree in Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. For her Master thesis, she conducted fieldwork in Vienna to study the entanglements of (In)security, Islamophobia and Soft Authoritarianism. Her PhD explores the imaginations, contestations and reproductions of democracy and the ‘demos’ in Austria from a critical intersectional perspective.