Research Areas
Political Psychology, Political Communication, Public Opinion, Race, Gender, and Politics
Political Psychology, Political Communication, Public Opinion, Race, Gender, and Politics
Selected Works in Progress
“Media Depictions of Drug Addiction During the Crack Scare and Opioid Crisis”
In recent years, a narrative about drug addiction has emerged and been stated repeatedly in public discourse. This narrative suggests that the collective response to the opioid crisis has been much more compassionate than reactions to the crack scare because the prototypical drug user within the opioid crisis context is white, whereas crack users were predominately thought to be African American. I refer to this account as the compassion-gap narrative. In this paper I subject this popular claim to empirical scrutiny. Adopting a multi-method approach, I analyze visual and textual depictions of drug addiction present in media coverage during the crack scare and opioid crisis. I find support for the compassion gap narrative in visual depictions of drug use as well as textual depictions that focus on the attributes of drug users, the etiology of addiction, and policy references. However, textual depictions of the race, gender, class, and spatially-located aspects of addiction suggest compassionate depictions are not applied uniformly across white drug users. Rather, white rural drug use is depicted in much more stigmatizing terms than white suburban drug use. Thus, I argue that the compassionate-gap narrative is not only a story of black marginalization but the contingent nature of calls for compassion for white drug users. These findings suggest it is important to remain attentive to subgroup dynamics when analyzing political discourse and also consider how the format of political information may influence the public's perceptions of policy problems.
"They Can’t Be Forgiven and No One Can Forget: An Examination of Political Storytelling in Media Accounts of the Student Debt Crisis"
In October 2017, the United States Department of Education provided the first-ever look at the long-term effects of student loan debt on borrowers by race and ethnicity. The data were stark. They showed that more than a decade after taking on debt to finance their undergraduate education, most African Americans owed more than they originally borrowed. In fact, in the report, the Department of Education found that almost half of African Americans had defaulted on their loans. In this project, I examine elite discourse related to education debt to illustrate the ways in which this issue has been racialized, gendered, and classed despite the absence of systematic data about students’ backgrounds and outcomes over time. In particular, I detail constructions of the “prototypical borrower” in media accounts between 2002 and 2016. I then analyze narratives of blame and responsibility that emerged in the news stories and describe how they are related to depictions of the prototypical borrower: a process I refer to as political storytelling. I argue that this storytelling has likely shaped the electorate’s perception of the student debt crisis as well as their willingness to mobilize around this issue.
Teaching Race, Racism, and Racial Justice: Pedagogical Principles and Strategies (with Amie Thurber and Joe Bandy)
Teaching on topics of race and racism presents unique challenges to leaders in the university classroom setting. Despite an increasing number of instructors bringing a critical analysis of racial in/justice to their curriculum, many report challenges in teaching this content effectively. Drawing on a systematic review of work that grapples with issues of difference within the university classroom setting, we summarize the common challenges in teaching racial content, describe ways that instructors can be proactive about addressing these challenges in the course planning phase, and define five pedagogical strategies, and supporting classroom practices, that will help instructors effectively manage everyday classroom interactions.