"We're messy on purpose"
Organizing is messy work, so Rachel Kuo and Lorelei Lee creating this toolkit, a set of best practices to address common challenges found in community organizing. They draw on interviews with organizers in collectives like the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, Lysistrata, Red Canary Song, Whose Corner Is It Anyway, California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, and Street Vendors Project.
Education impacts belief gaps, but the effects are not evenly felt across issues or political affiliations
In this article for the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Shannon McGregor and her co-authors Magdalena Saldaña and Tom Johnson explore the relationships among political identity, education, and the prevalence of false beliefs about topics that have become politically polarized. To more fully understand the belief gap hypothesis, this study examines the effect of political identity, education, and partisan media consumption on the formation of attitudes and false beliefs. Using a two-wave, nationally representative online survey of the U.S., the authors assess people’s attitudes and beliefs toward climate change, on the one hand, and Syrian refugees, on the other. Building on previous studies, they demonstrate that the effect of one’s political identity on attitudes and false beliefs is contingent upon education, which appears to widen the belief gap in consort with political identity.
Exploiting white fear continues to galvanize voters
In a new opinion piece in Scientific American, CITAP faculty Daniel Kreiss, Alice Marwick, and Francesca Tripodi describe how political campaigns against critical race theory (CRT) continue a long tradition of linking racial justice movements to communism as a form of fearmongering. They conclude that effectively countering this disinformation campaign requires going beyond dismissals anti-CRT rhetoric as inaccurate to affirmatively supporting racial justice lessons in classrooms as a matter of equality and justice.