This summer, CITAP is celebrating big moves across our team.
Some familiar faces have new roles. After three years as senior research faculty, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Shannon McGregor, and Francesca Tripodi are joining Daniel Kreiss and Alice Marwick as CITAP Principal Investigators in recognition of their significant research and leadership contributions. A tiny selection of highlights includes:
Tressie McMillan Cottom has led work on the hustle economy and the sociology of race and racism in a digital society and discussed everything from Black Twitter and cryptocurrency to ChatGPT in her New York Times column.
Shannon McGregor has studied how journalists use Twitter, issued an urgent call to center inequality rather than polarization in research on U.S. politics, and is leading a collaboration with local journalists to use a democracy frame in covering elections. (Shannon also received tenure this spring and is now an Associate Professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media!)
Francesca Tripodi has explored how Wikipedia perpetuates social bias through its notability criteria, explained how propagandists and politicians exploit data voids to promote “doing your own research,” and studied how our identities shape the phrases we seek—and by extension, the information that we find.
We’re deeply grateful to have Tressie, Shannon, and Francesca as part of the CITAP community and are excited for their continued vision and expanded leadership going forward.
“With Tressie, Shannon, and Francesca becoming PIs, we recognize the energy and vision they have provided to CITAP over the past three years and embrace their central role in our Center’s future.” —Daniel Kreiss.
We’re also welcoming some new faces! Shannon Malone Gonzalez is joining CITAP as a Faculty Researcher. Dr. Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and a Faculty Fellow in the Carolina Population Center here at UNC. Her research examines the relationship between marginality and policing, with a special interest in how black women and girls experience, understand, and resist police surveillance and violence. Drawing from black feminism and critical criminology, Shannon uses mixed methods to investigate the social conditions that shape and obscure black women and girls’ experiences of policing across social institutions and contexts.
Tressie McMillan Cottom celebrated her addition:
“Shannon’s work is an insightful, grounded, and theoretically rich examination of the contours of Black life in a digitally-mediated state where power, media, and politics and institutional life determines life chances. This deepens CITAP’s ongoing interest in understanding disinformation, surveillance and civics through the lenses of power and inequality as we did in our critical disinformation case study on Crime & anti-Black Disinformation.”
Shannon McGregor echoed her, saying “Shannon’s groundbreaking work on how Black girls and women utilize, consume, and navigate digital media as they encounter and resist police complements but importantly expands CITAP’s research. I am beyond thrilled to welcome Shannon to CITAP, where we can further build our existing collaborations, support her important scholarship, and forge new research collaborations.”
Felicity Gancedo is joining CITAP as our new administrative associate, overseeing programmatic and administrative functions to support CITAP. She comes to us from the College of Arts and Sciences Business Office, where she led a digitization project and an office relocation. She is currently pursuing her Master's in Communication at East Carolina University after receiving her Bachelor of Science in Political Science at Arizona State University. She previously worked for Starbucks where she received tuition reimbursement for her Bachelor of Science degree, and is currently receiving funding for her MA through UNC's Tuition Waiver program and Chickasaw Nation.
Finally, we’re saying some farewells.
As we announced previously, postdoctoral researcher Yiping Xia is heading to Texas A&M University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism, and we wish him well in College Station!
Our software developer, Drew Crist, will be moving to the School of Medicine to work on AI-based health research. Drew’s contributions made PIEGraph possible, and we’re excited to see what other tools and advances he will contribute to in this new role.
I’m also moving on from CITAP at the end of the summer. I arrived in July 2020 alongside our three newest PIs and have loved getting to support these amazing faculty, postdocs, and students. I’m proud of the strategy and vision we’ve put in place and the programs we’ve created, including the Bulletin of Tech and Public Life, the Does Not Compute podcast, our founding partnership in the Public Technology Leadership Collaborative, and our collaborations with peers from across the Knight Research Network. CITAP is a truly special organization, and it’s been an honor to be part of it.
We’ll be recruiting a new executive director shortly, and I hope you’ll help us share the posting far and wide. In the meantime, Daniel Kreiss will be serving as interim executive director and Alice Marwick will be leading the search for the next leader to open a new chapter with CITAP.
Publications and appearances
“Unfortunately, as Tripodi explains in her 2022 book The Propagandists’ Playbook, carefully checking facts and arguments with a Google search does not guarantee wisdom, objectivity or even exposure to contrary arguments. To pick a simple and fairly benign example, when NFL players started kneeling during the national anthem, Trump claimed that NFL ratings were down. Google “NFL ratings down” and you’d see confirmation from Trump-sympathising websites that he was right. Google “NFL ratings up” and you’d see a list of headlines from liberal websites claiming the opposite.
“To avoid this problem, a truth-seeking citizen should systematically search for contrary views. But few people, from any part of the political spectrum, tend to do this. This is not because of crude partisanship, but a more subtle glitch in our logic modules.” “Undercover Economist” Tim Harford wrote about The Propagandists’ Playbook in his column for the Financial Times.
The Treasury Department’s Office of Economic Policy is publishing a series on racial inequality. The latest post on educational attainment cites Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Lower Ed as one of its sources.
“[Twitter had] this sort of outsize role because it's never been a huge percent of the population, necessarily, that's been on it. But journalists were on it, politicians were on it, cultural and artistic leaders were on it, people behind social movements were on it. And so that made it this really important place where all those folks interacted. What happened on Twitter became part of the public conversation became part of the media story and then reached so many people who weren't on the platform and shaped so many things that didn't have anything to do directly with the platform itself.” Shannon McGregor talked with Connecticut Public Radio’s Colin McEnroe about what’s going on with Twitter and why it matters.
“It’s easy to assume that those who challenge books threaten our democracy, but it is equally important to acknowledge that the person contesting said material can do so because they live in a functioning democracy.” Francesca Tripodi spoke with Reuters about challenges to books in school libraries.
“Academics are playing a weird shell game of denial. We know government attacks are happening all around us. Even in presumably safely Democratic-controlled states, what friendly governor wouldn’t mind a little more direct control over faculty hiring? No public profession is safe.” Writing for Inside Higher Ed, John Warner quotes Tressie McMillan Cottom’s latest New York Times column in his round-up of challenges facing higher education.
“On the one hand, it is certainly more aggressive than their current harassment or conspiracy theory policies. On the other hand, by only prohibiting conspiratorial content that specifically targets other individuals or groups, it may leave huge amounts of leeway for QAnon content to continue to thrive.” Becca Lewis weighed in on new YouTube policies intended to limit harassment anchored in QAnon and Pizzagate theories for NBC News.
“How did civil society organizations engage and negotiate with various stakeholders for/in [civil rights] audits? What are the implications of these audits as a platform governance mechanism? Why have U.S.-based civil society organizations pushed for a civil rights framework for auditing platforms?” Jeeyun (Sophia) Baik and Hamsini Sridharan explore civil rights audits as a counterpublic strategy in Information, Communication, and Society.
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Congratulations to Heesoo Jang on receiving AEJMC’s Inez Kaiser Graduate Students of Color Award! The award honors public relations pioneer Inez Kaiser and recognizes excellent work from graduate students of color. Heesoo employs communication theories and mixed-method research to investigate the impacts and harms of artificial intelligence (AI) and transnational digital platforms, particularly on marginalized groups.
Coming soon
October 16 at CITAP: Misinformation and Marginalization Symposium. Registration information coming soon!
October 18 at AoIR: Alice Marwick, Yvonne Eadon, and Rachel Kuo are among the co-organizers of an AoIR preconference on future of conspiracy.
🚨DEADLINE MONDAY 🚨: October 22 at the Annenberg Public Policy Center: The Post-API Conference. Proposals due July 17.
Rest of Web
“Can democracy persist in a society so stratified by race and ethnic differences? Can democracy persist in a society in which some believe that they are entitled to a permanent hold on power, thus, and are willing to do whatever it takes to deny that power to others? Can democracy persist in a society so marked by social and political inequality?” Hakeem Jefferson wrote about democracy’s incompatibility with racial hierarchy for the San Francisco Chronicle. If you missed his CITAP speaker series talk, you should absolutely watch it now.
Are you a researcher, either academic or of the practice, who’s studying local news? Our neighbors at the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media are starting a Local News Researcher Community to discuss upcoming, in-progress and recently published projects on a monthly basis.