Democratic Futures Project
Governance
Steve Parks
Founder
Steve Parks is a professor in the Writing and Rhetoric Program at the University of Virginia’s Department of English, and a co-founder of Syrians for Truth and Justice. Currently the editor of Studies in Writing and Rhetoric, Parks’ early work focused on the Students’ Right to Their Own Language, particularly the need to embed the SRTOL’s politics into progressive community partnerships and publications. This led him to create New City Community Press in Philadelphia, which links university classrooms, local communities, and publishing technologies in their efforts to expand human rights. Currently, he is working with Syrian activists to record the human rights abuses of the current regime, ISIS, and militia active in Syria.
Srdja Popovic
Co-Founder
Srdja Popovic was a founding member of the student movement Otpor! (“Resistance!”), which played a crucial role in toppling the Milosevic regime. A co-founder of CANVAS (Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies), he now works as a global activist and educator. Popovic has taught university courses on organizing tactics and workshops on how nonviolence can achieve positive social change. He’s also authored several publications on the topic, including the book Blueprint for Revolution.
Popovic has received the Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, Brown Democracy Medal, and the 2010 PL-Fonden Freedom Award. Foreign Policy Magazine named Popovic one of their “100 Global Thinkers” in 2011, and the World Economic Forum in Davos listed him as a 2014 Young Global Leader. Since 2021, Popovic has held the position of Visiting Researcher at the University of Virginia.
Emily Warwick
Emily Warwick is a PhD student in the Department of Politics at UVA, with concentrations in comparative politics and political methodology. Her research interests center around urban politics of the Global South, public service provision, urban informality, and environmental/health politics. Her dissertation explores how citizen-state relationships are brokered in informal contexts and how civil society actors adapt to chronic challenges in the urban peripheries of Latin America. She also serves as the Book Review Editor for the GFPI (Generations for Peace Institute) Transformations journal, an interdisciplinary journal which centers the voices of global democratic advocates and community leaders on issues of human rights and peacemaking. In her work with the Democratic Futures Working Group and Ríos de Pie, she is assisting with research on forest governance, indigenous politics, and public opinion surrounding environmental issues and deforestation in Bolivia.
Stephen Betts
Stephen Betts is a doctoral candidate in religious studies with interests in race, language, democracy, and nonviolence. In addition to his work with the Democratic Futures Project, Stephen is an assistant producer for the Karsh Institute's podcast, "Democracy in Danger." Before coming to UVA, Stephen got a master's degree in linguistics and worked in a public library. His current research focuses on how the notion of "translation" in nineteenth-century Mormonism was involved in the material production of race in antebellum America.