Cailyn Hansen

the basics

My name is Cailyn Hansen, and my pronouns are she/her/hers. I currently live on unceded Munsee Lenape lands and am from unceded Objibwe lands. I am working to build a revolutionary and liberatory future through community, collaboration, writing, generative conflict, and collective creative imagining.

I have a nuanced relationship to labels and identity, especially around gender, sexuality, and intimacy. However, I could be described as a white-bodied, polyamorous (probably), bisexual, trans woman. These identities and lived experiences thereof inform both my theory and praxis in the world. I'm abolitionist (in the prison industial complex, in the criminal legal system, and in the family senses). I'm also an anti-capitalist (and currently leaning towards communitarian anarchy).

the details

coming soon

for joy & leisure

I am learning herbalism and tarot reading. I love to cook & bake and share these creations with others. I write, mostly creative non-fiction a la essays and memoir but am trying to expand into fiction. I go for frequent meanders through Brooklyn, listening to various podcasts. I read a bunch of leftist theory, science & speculative fiction, and queer YA. I frequent independent bookstores and cafes. I appreciate (with an appropriate amount of frustation of) the MTA. Time permitting, I hike and camp throughout upstate NY and nearby locations.

My recent or in-progress leisure reads include:

• The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus
• Babel by R.F. Kuang
• The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri
• Jay's Gay Agenda by Jason June
• The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
• Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
• Little Gods by Meng Jin

for activism

I feel particularly strongly about a generative praxis that centers community building (and rejects electoral politics, while acknowledging their importance in lived experiences of oppression). I focus on highlighting and uplifting the collective and social imaginary that aims to realize the impossible.

I also dedicate time for tenant rights and PIC abolition. I take a nuanced, dialectic view vis a vis change theories and work alongside and with multiple organizations with various praxis (at times seemingly contradictory but I find contradiction generative and synthetic).

for study

My recent or in-progress scholastic reads include:

• Screw Consent
• emergent strategy by adrienne maree brown
• Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis
• The Impossible Community: Realizing Communatarian Anarchism by John P. Clark
• holding change by adrienne maree brown

I graduated from Brown University in May 2019 with degress in ethnic studies and computer science. My capstone (like a thesis but less writing and more not-writing) project explored the ways maps a) encode hidden dimensions of information and b) are politcal projects themselves. I created Borders and Othering: (De)Constructing Maps of North America to present under-told histories of U.S. westward expansion, nativist imperialism, and the impact on Mexico and indigenous communities. It does so by creating an interactive environment to explore the way maps are produced, display information, and leave certain narratives untold.

for compensation

I'm a software engineer at Duolingo, working on the Duolingo for Schools team. I do full-stack web development. Most recently, I led a project to rearchitect our assignment processing and activity tracking features. I work primarily in Python, TypeScript, and Kotlin.

I've previously worked for Ridwell - an environmentally focused start-up aiming to reduce consumer waste and build a scalable reusable economy. I joined as the third engineer and helped build out the engineering team, developed new interview types, and led the infrastructure migration from Heroku and AWS ElasticBeanstalk to AWS Fargate with AWS CDK.

Before that, I joined Skylight Digital as a software and data engineer and government consultant working with the Office of Early Childhood in CT. There I built new data collection tools for childcare providers to report on state-mandated data and assisted in analysis of data for longitudinal studies of educational attainment.

I run a consultancy, River Delta, focused on state & local governments and educational institutions. Most recently, I partnered with civilla on the One Day project for Michigan's Department of Health and Human Services. I developed various Python scripts to parse, process, store, and analyze information from PDF reports generated (the only access the agency had) from internal data systems.

from essays

from school

The Question(s) of Success: Understanding Racialized Conceptions of Success in Mexican and Jewish Acculturation

A paper exploring the connections between Jewish-American Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky and George Washington Gomez by Chicano-American Américo Paredes.

from my journal

I Love My Anxiety

A short-form piece that outlines my evolving relationship to my anxiety and how I've come to appreciate it.