Biography, Background Information and About — Micah Bornfree, PhD (Micah White) (2024)

White's first book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, was published in 2016 by Knopf Canada. The End of Protest has been translated into German and Greek.White's essays and interviews on the future of protest have been published internationally in periodicals including The New York Times, The Guardian,Folha de São Paulo,The Washington Post, Poder (Brazil) and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He has been a featured guest on major network television shows such as Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, the BBC's Newsnight and The National, Canada’s flagship nightly current affairs broadcast.

He has a twenty year record of innovative activism, including conceiving the debt forgiveness tactic used by theRolling JubileeandRIP Medical Debt,popularizing the critique ofclicktivismand identifying the emerging trend of "social movement warfare."

He is a sought after global public speaker. He has delivered more than thirty lectures at prestigious universities,cultural festivals and private events in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Indonesia, the Netherlands and the United States.Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation, White has been profiled by NPR's Morning Edition,The New Yorkerand The Guardian. In recognition of his contributions,Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today.

As a teenage activist he was awarded Americans United's Religious Liberty Award, the ACLU of Michigan’s Wendy Joyrich Award, the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Ruth Jokinen Student Activist Memorial Award, and the ACLU of Greater Flint Michigan's Civil Libertarian of The Year Award.In college he sparked the nationwide Diebold Electronic Civil Disobedience.

White received his MA and PhD (summa cum laude) in Media and Communications from the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland where he studied with leading philosophers Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek and Avital Ronell. He holds a BA in Philosophy with a minor in Film and Media Studies and a minor in Interpretation Theory from Swarthmore College.

Micah White lives with his wife, Chiara Ricciardone, and children in Kingston, NY where he directs Activist Graduate School, an online school for activists.

In 2016, he ran for Mayor of Nehalem, a rural city on the Oregon coast, an effort that was covered by Fusion, The Guardian and NPR.

In 2017, Micah was a Fulani Fellow at the All Stars Project in New York City where he worked with Dr. Lenora Fulani, the first woman to run for president of the United States and get on the ballot in all 50 states. As a Fulani Fellow he studied the revolutionary potential of electoral social movements.

In 2018, Micah was awarded the Roddenberry Fellowshipand Voqal Fellowship to create Activist Graduate School. He was also named the National Endowment for the Humanities / Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Bard College where he is co-teaching a seminar on social activism.

In 2019, he was selected as an activist-in-residence at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin.

Sample of Recent Talks