As we near the end of July, time with our inaugural postdocs Rachel Kuo and Meredith L. Pruden is winding down. We’ve been so lucky to have them as part of the CITAP team these past few years and we’re excited to continue working with them as affiliates in the upcoming year. Today we’re sharing some of the amazing work they accomplished during their time with us.
Rachel:
Asian American Digital Politics: A research project, with Bianca Nozaki-Nasser and Turner Willman, that investigates Asian American and Pacific Islander political formations in digital spaces.
Dis/Organizing: How We Build Collectives Beyond Institutions: Created with Lorelei Lee, this toolkit provides key organizing lessons, strategies, and political visions from migrant worker and sex worker-led political formations. This toolkit was supported by the Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech Rapid Response grant.
Critical disinformation studies: History, power, and politics: Coauthored with Alice Marwick, this essay advocates a critical approach to disinformation research that is grounded in history, culture, and politics, and centers questions of power and inequality.
Asian diasporic communities: The need for critical transnational research beyond Anglocentrism: An essay coauthored with Lan Li, Rachel E. Moran, Sarah Nguyễn, and Madhavi Reddi. They advocate for qualitative research methodologies that can better examine historical, transnational, multilingual, and intergenerational information networks using examples from Vietnam, Taiwan, China, and India.
Identity propaganda: Racial narratives and disinformation: Coauthored with Madhavi Reddi and Daniel Kreiss, this article develops the concept of “identity propaganda”.
Meredith:
Weaponizing reproductive rights: a mixed-method analysis of White nationalists’ discussion of abortions online: With Yotam Ophir, Dror Walter, Ayse Lokmanoglu, Catherine Tebaldi, and Rui Wang, this article gives a critical insight into how white nationalists discuss abortion online.
Vaccine discourse in white nationalist online communication: With Yotam Ophir, Dror Walter, and Ayse Lokmanoglu, this study tracks almost two decades of vaccine discourse on the white nationalist online message-board Stormfront.
Watching Awakening: Violent White Masculinity in Cuck: This chapter in Male Supremacism in the United States asks questions about the 2019 film and how the far-right and misogynists are influenced by visual culture.
Birds of a Feather: A Comparative Analysis of White Supremacist and Violent Male Supremacist Discourses: With Ayse Lokmanoglu, Anne Peterscheck, and Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, this chapter in Right-Wing Extremism in Canada and the United States explores the intersection of white and male supremacy.
Inequities of Race, Place, and Gender Among the Communication Citation Elite: Coauthored with Deen Freelon, Kirsten Eddy, and Rachel Kuo, this article is currently under revision but we’re eagerly waiting for its publication.
As for their next move, Rachel will be heading off to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies. Meredith will be heading off to Kennesaw State University as an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Media.
We’re excited to see what they both accomplish at their new institutions. Join us in congratulating them! 🎊
Publications and appearances
“It often starts with humor, or with making sort of edgy jokes, or passing around hateful words, and then it turns to adopting justification for acts of violence.” Alice Marwick talked to WKOW about the role of online radicalization in mass shootings.
“It is possible that Mastriano is curating his social media presence for the general election after a bruising primary with a large Republican field.” Shannon McGregor talked to the Philadelphia Inquirer about the disappearance of videos from Doug Mastriano’s Facebook campaign page.
“These types of recap videos, which are also popular on other platforms like YouTube, thrive online because of the ‘parasocial’ relationship the viewer has with the audience.” Shannon McGregor talked to the Washington Post about how young people are explaining the Jan. 6 hearings on TikTok.
“One way to get beyond content moderation is to really be thinking about how we can diversify the sorts of people that are trained to be in the position to make these decisions? What kind of different lived experiences and cultural knowledge can we get in the room so that there isn’t a dominant ideology built into the design of a platform?” Shannon McGregor was one of the panelists this week at the Internet Governance Forum’s panel “Beyond Content: Improving Trust and Safety”.
Affiliate Bethany Bowra’s Florida policy survey is out. It includes questions about Floridians’ opinions on social media platforms.
Coming soon
August 1: Submissions for the Labor Tech Book and Graduate Student Paper Awards are due.
August 4: Asian Americans and Disinformation: A Critical Discussion hosted by the Asian American Disinformation Table (AADT)
August 10: NC Elections Prep: Focus on Democracy hosted by the NC Local News Workshop. CITAP folks will be there!
August 15: Starling Lab Journalism Fellowship application deadline.
Rest of Web
The Center for an Informed Public is looking for a software engineer.
Francesca Tripodi received physical copies of The Propagandists’ Playbook this week and we can’t contain our excitement for August 16.
Tressie McMillan Cottom is this week’s TueNighter!