Featured Research
Partisan public health: how does political ideology influence support for COVID-19 related misinformation?
This study analyzes over 4000 tweets related to six misinformation topics about the COVID-19 pandemic: the use of hydroxychloroquine as treatment, the use of bleach as a preventative measure, Bill Gates intentionally causing the virus, the Chinese Communist Party intentionally causing the virus, and the Deep State causing the virus to ruin the economy and threaten President Trump’s reelection chances. Across 5 of 6 topics (excluding bleach), conservatives dominate the discourse on Twitter. Conservatives are also more likely than their liberal peers to believe in and push conspiracy theories that the Chinese Communist Party, Bill Gates, and the Deep State are working in conjunction to infect the population and enact a surveillance state. Pandemic related misinformation has previously been associated with decreased adherence to public health recommendations and adverse health effects and evidence from the current pandemic indicates that adherence to public health recommendations is starkly partisan. This study suggests that the political and informational polarization further facilitated by social media platforms such as Twitter may have dire consequences for public health.
Radicalized on Campus? (Un)Coded Whiteness as Campus Social Movement
This paper explores how whiteness is rhetorically employed in the recruitment and organizational strategies of conservative student campus groups prior to, during, and after the 2016 US presidential election cycle and during the 2020 presidential election cycle. Drawing on both critical whiteness studies and social movements, this study examines how conservative students engage in framing processes designed to convert non-adherents to adherents of a group ideology and interrogates how whiteness influences this framing. Through a multi-site case study analysis incorporating observation, interviews, and a critical document analysis of over100 unique articles and student group artifacts (flyers, social media posts, student newspaper editorials) and over 2000 tweets over two distinct time points, I find that conservative student groups are employing whiteness to recruit new students over shared experiences “coming out” as conservative, identifying as the academically and intellectually rigorous side of the campus political debate, and disidentifying with contemporary campus liberalism.
Bridging the Gap: Summer Bridge Programs as an Effective Strategy for Improving Minority Student Academic Attainment in Community Colleges
This study explored the impact of a summer bridge program designed to support minority and low-income students in their transition from high school to higher education. We focused on the program’s longitudinal effects on students’ GPAs, units earned, math and English course completions, and persistence rates over a period of two years, across multiple program cohorts at a community college in California. Using propensity score analysis to control for selection bias, we found significant and robust positive outcomes for the program. These findings support efforts to implement Summer Bridge Programs as an institutional intervention to improve low-income and underrepresented minority students’ academic outcomes in community colleges.