Hans Asenbaum is an Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy at the University of Canberra and an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher (DECRA) Fellow. He advances transformative approaches to democracy by combining theoretical innovation and empirical insight. His research interests include radical democracy, digital politics and AI, queer and gender studies, new materialism, and participatory research methods. In 2022 he received the ECPR Rising Star Award. Hans is the author of The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2022) as well as co-editor of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, New Media & Society, Politics & Gender, and the International Journal of Qualitative Methods.

His DECRA, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), draws on ethnography and participatory research methods to investigate how humans form social relations and emotional bonds with AI agents in democratic participation. It aims to foster democratic agency by enhancing emotional intelligence and critical reflection.

After defending his thesis at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster, he held a position as Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany.

Currently, Dr Asenbaum is a member of the National Institute of Science and Technology on Digital Democracy, INCT.DD and a regular visiting research fellow at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, UFMG. He is a co-investigator of Participedia and the ARC Linkage project on the Global Citizens Assembly on Genome Editing.