Liz McKenna is a postdoctoral scholar at the SNF Agora Institute and P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She studies left and right-wing political organizing in the United States and Brazil, using multiple methods to examine when civil society organizations safeguard against authoritarianism, and when they become the primary carriers of it. She is the coauthor of two books on grassroots organizing: Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America (with Hahrie Han and Michelle Oyakawa; University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Groundbreakers: How Obama's 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America (with Hahrie Han; Oxford University Press, 2014). She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.