Society, Law & Politics

Why did ABC News avoid the courtroom?

Megan Maneval — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:02:38 +0000

Why did ABC News avoid the courtroom? Megan Maneval Mon, 12/23/2024 - 08:02

College of Media, Communication and Information

Assistant Teaching Professor Angelica Kalika discusses flak ABC News got for quickly settling a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald Trump.

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Musicology doctoral candidate explores new research in Japan thanks to CAAAS fellowship

Megan Maneval — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 15:16:22 +0000

Musicology doctoral candidate explores new research in Japan thanks to CAAAS fellowship Megan Maneval Fri, 12/13/2024 - 08:16

Ubochi Igbokwe used funding provided by the new Center for African & African American Studies Graduate Student Fellowship Program to study Igbo African masquerade music and the cultural impacts of the Igbo African émigrés—a previously unresearched area of African cultural expression.

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CAAAS fellow visits formerly segregated state parks

Megan Maneval — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 21:55:40 +0000

CAAAS fellow visits formerly segregated state parks Megan Maneval Thu, 12/12/2024 - 14:55

Trevor Egerton, a history doctoral candidate studying race and outdoor recreation in the 20th century American South, visited three formerly segregated state parks in Tennessee and South Carolina to interview local residents and workers and explore archival documents.

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Notre Dame cathedral rises from the ashes

Megan Maneval — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 19:51:43 +0000

Notre Dame cathedral rises from the ashes Megan Maneval Wed, 12/04/2024 - 12:51

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

Five years after a devastating fire at Notre Dame, Professor Kirk Ambrose reflects on the significance of the renowned cathedral’s Dec. 7 reopening.

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The world’s food system is broken—this group wants to help fix it

Megan Maneval — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 19:44:58 +0000

The world’s food system is broken—this group wants to help fix it Megan Maneval Wed, 12/04/2024 - 12:44

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

With FrontLine Farming, ��ƷSM��ӰƬ scholars and community colleagues focus on food security, food justice and food liberation.

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Kinship may not mean what you think it does

Megan Maneval — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 14:12:35 +0000

Kinship may not mean what you think it does Megan Maneval Thu, 11/21/2024 - 07:12

��ƷSM��ӰƬ anthropologist Kathryn Goldfarb spearheaded a new book that examines the difficult aspects of family connection.

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Gen Z takes the red pill

Megan Maneval — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 19:42:16 +0000

Gen Z takes the red pill Megan Maneval Tue, 11/19/2024 - 12:42

Joe Arney , College of Media, Communication and Information

Editor’s note: This article contains explicit language.

Election Day has always contained its share of surprises, but one that floored most pundits as the polls closed was just how strongly Gen Z—especially the men of that generation—went from blue bastion to red redoubt.

But for Karen Ashcraft, the writing was on the wall. In fact, the writing was from a book she published two years ago, which warned that “viral masculinity” was a growing threat to young men and boys not just in the United States but worldwide.

Karen Ashcraft

“I think a lot of people picture the manosphere as individual content creators, or trolls and shitposters and such, but actually, it’s a movement—a form of digital organizing that has absolutely mushroomed over the last 20 years,” said Ashcraft, a ��ƷSM��ӰƬ alumna and professor of communication at the College of Media, Communication and Information at ��ƷSM��ӰƬ. “It’s a viral stew of aggrieved manhood—the seething sense that real manhood is under attack and must fight back. This feeling now saturates the environment to an extent that men and boys cannot escape repetitive contact with it.”

Ashcraft is not a new voice on this topic. As she was earning her doctoral degree from ��ƷSM��ӰƬ, Hollywood was premiering “Fight Club” and “The Matrix,” which set the stage for key tenets of the manosphere. But even before then, Ashcraft brought a perspective to the discipline that other scholars have not.

“I was born and raised a right-wing populist,” she said. “Well before Trump, my family was part of the religious right, we were preppers—all of it. So, I come at this from a place that is not anti-populism, but pro-men and boys. We need to address the challenges they face, and we can do that in a pro-feminist way.”

The challenge is how successfully right-wing populist movements have changed their approach to suit the digital age—it’s no longer just Rush Limbaugh preaching to a comparatively narrow audience on talk radio. But, Ashcraft said, this is not a case of “the internet did it,” nor is it just about the gravitas of personalities like Andrew Tate or Lex Fridman.

Instead, “The sentiment of aggrieved manhood got rebranded,” she said. “It went from bitter old guys in their basements, plotting militia activity, to becoming this sort of punk, anarchist, edgy thing. It’s a new counterculture that happened through this explosion of online activity.”

And while there are different flavors to that extremism—from the United States to Russia to Iran—they all start with the same ingredient—a light touch of misogyny and aggrieved manhood. It is, Ashcraft said, “a gateway drug to the far right.”

“The feeling that manly rights have been wronged—men versus women—travels the world very easily, because it’s a simple binary,” she said. “People all over the world—men, but let’s not kid ourselves, women, too—can get infected with this feeling that men have lost out to women. And because it’s everywhere, boys get enticed by this idea, and then it opens up into this larger far-right world.”

Family ties

If you’re dreading the conversation at the kids’ table this Thanksgiving, Ashcraft said you shouldn’t. As someone who’s watched these attitudes become more common in her classroom, and as someone who works hard to maintain strong family ties with people who don’t share her worldview, she said the first—and hardest—thing to do is to stop trying to persuade people.

Not only does that not work, typically causing people to retrench deeper into their beliefs, her research has found that arguing the facts and trying to fight disinformation is a source of oxygen to this particular fire. So, too, is the empathetic response of trying to understand the legitimacy of the anger and aggrieved feelings spewed by the manosphere.

Instead, Ashcraft’s research proposes the notion of lateral empathy, in which we put greater care on how people become “infected” by the viral feeling of manly grievance and less care on the content of what people say.

“When I see this in class, or when I talk to young people, I address it at the level of feeling,” she said. “‘You seem agitated. Tell me about that—what does that feel like? What really riles you up?’

“For the sake of smart and new and adaptive interventions, we need to grasp that in today’s communication environment, feeling is in the driver’s seat. Content has become the secondary thing that gives feeling an outlet.”

And teaching younger generations will require a shift, as well.

‘A very big shift’

“We teach people all about how to sift through good ideas but nothing about how to understand the circuits of their bodies that receive emotion,” she said. At CMCI alone, she said, researchers in information science, journalism, media studies and elsewhere know how feeling works when it engages with algorithms, news, movies and beyond.

“It’s a very big shift, and not an intuitive one, but we need to cultivate lateral empathy in many different arenas, and education could play a big role in that,” she said.

It already plays a role in her own life. While Ashcraft doesn’t subscribe to the populism of her family, she works very hard to keep her familial ties strong.

“When you’re talking about family, love is on the line,” she said. “At the Thanksgiving table, stop the content, surrender that desire to argue head-to-head, and settle into that deeper level of feeling.

“I had a recent conversation with a relative, where I said, ‘I know we’re trying to avoid these topics—but they keep coming up, my heart rate is increasing, I’m scared. I love you, and I hear your agitation. What is the agitation? Can you tell me how you’re hurt by my concern for women’s reproductive rights?’ So it’s at the level of the feeling that is relevant to preserving the relationship.”

��ƷSM��ӰƬ Today regularly publishes Q&As with our faculty members weighing in on news topics through the lens of their scholarly expertise and research/creative work. The responses here reflect the knowledge and interpretations of the expert and should not be considered the university position on the issue. All publication content is subject to edits for clarity, brevity and university style guidelines.

The College of Media, Communication and Information’s Karen Ashcroft explains why young men’s politics are moving right.

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Are your digital affairs in order? A new pro-bono clinic can help

Yvaine Ye — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 18:12:48 +0000

Are your digital affairs in order? A new pro-bono clinic can help Yvaine Ye Fri, 11/15/2024 - 11:12

Lisa Marshall

From family photos stored on the cloud to social media posts cataloging life’s pivotal moments, to music, art and stories we create and share online, the digital world is infused with representations of who we are.

What happens to that digital legacy after we die, and how do we manage the virtual heirlooms our loved ones leave behind?

Digital Legacy Clinic Founder Jed Brubaker (second to the right) talks with students (left to right) Daniel Sullivan, Rory O’Flynn, Dylan Thomas Doyle and Jack Manning. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/��ƷSM��ӰƬ)

��ƷSM��ӰƬ’s new Digital Legacy Clinic has answers.

“Whether you are making plans for your own passing or maybe you have lost a loved one and are dealing with their digital affairs, it can be an overwhelming process at a time of life that is already really hard,” said clinic founder Jed Brubaker, an associate professor of Information Science. “What you are supposed to do and how to do it is not always clear and, unfortunately, most tech platforms don’t have systems in place to help. That’s where we step in.”

Launched this month, the first-of-its-kind clinic operates similarly to a pro-bono law clinic, with specially trained Information Science students providing free advice and troubleshooting for the public.

As Brubaker points out, the average internet user has as many as 191 accounts, from Google drives loaded with cherished snapshots to Pinterest accounts containing favorite recipes and Ancestry.com accounts tracing family trees back for generations. Yet, according to one forthcoming paper from his lab, only 13% of platforms have features expressly designed to address the end-of-life needs of their users.

“Companies think about designing for all kinds of different aspects of our lives, from birthdays to wedding anniversaries,” he said. “But they have overlooked perhaps the most profound one of all, which is when those lives come to an end.”

7 ways to preserve your digital legacy

Have a plan in place before you die. Even a simple plan is better than none.
Use built-in features like Facebook’s Legacy Contact (which Brubaker’s research inspired), to designate a postmortem steward who can memorialize and manage your social accounts. Apple also has a Legacy Contact feature and Google provides support through its Inactive Account Manager feature.
Start small. Rather than crafting a comprehensive inventory of all accounts, start with one or two that mean the most to you.
Focus on the content. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, focus on the most important data first. Many people start with digital photos or social media and then expand outwards from there.
Identify someone you trust to put in charge and tell them why it is important that you want those accounts preserved.
Share your passwords with that person. This can help, but with the advent of biometric authentication (through fingerprints or facial recognition) and two-factor authentication (which sends a text to users before letting them into their account) this can get complicated when the user has died.
Tell your family what you want: Family and friends want to respect your wishes and not knowing what you want can be stressful.
Source: The Digital Legacy Clinic at ��ƷSM��ӰƬ

Why you need a plan

In 15 years of studying what he calls ‘the digital afterlife,’ Brubaker has uncovered a host of heartbreaking reasons it’s worth making an end-of-life plan for our data. Facebook pages – left inaccessible to anyone but their creator – can linger long after that person has died, leaving algorithms to send eerie birthday notifications or ‘memories’ to grieving loved ones.

Family members without passwords frequently hit roadblocks when trying to access photos or videos from the deceased’s Google or iCloud storage accounts.

Original art, music, stories or professional work shared via digital platforms or personal websites can be deleted and lost forever if unaccounted for.

And the sheer volume of data can be daunting for the those tasked with sorting through it after someone dies.

“If grandma dies and you have to sort through her attic, at least you know where the attic is, you know where the key is and you know where the attic ends,” said Brubaker. “When it comes to our digital spaces, they are almost infinite. We keep putting more and more stuff in there and while some of it matters, some of it doesn’t.”

Because tech companies, by nature, tend to have minimalist customer service departments, surviving family members often face endless hold times and unanswered messages, exacerbating their grief.

“Our analysis revealed that most platforms offer minimal functional support and that many end-of-life needs are impossible to meet or rely on unsanctioned workarounds,” said Dylan Thomas Doyle, a former hospital chaplain-turned PhD candidate and clinic service provider.

Working the workarounds

After years of studying such problems, Brubaker turned to a colleague a few years ago to wonder aloud if there was an organization that helped people through this process.

“As I was saying it, I realized it: ‘Oh. We are that group. We need to create this.’”

With a $550,000 National Science Foundation CAREER Grant, he got to work, developing a new class that information science students (a blend of technology and behavioral science) helped build the clinic from the ground up.

To prep for the launch, they have taken sensitivity training, consulted with lawyers and dug into the technical intricacies of dozens of platforms. They’ve also handled a few dozen cases already.

In one, they helped a grieving widow preserve her late husband’s blog about his long battle with cancer. In another, they helped a mother who had lost her daughter to suicide stay connected to her memorialized Facebook account after a technical glitch kicked her off.

“It’s been a really powerful experience to hear their stories and be able to help them,” said graduate student Daniel Sullivan.

Classmate Rory O’Flynn, an artist, said that being part of the clinic has prompted her to reflect on how she would want her own legacy preserved.

Would she want to have her Instagram profile memorialized so her friends could visit it? Who in her family would get the password to access her sketches?

“The younger generation, especially, has this perception of the internet as kind of the whole world. We leave all these digital footprints out there, but the average citizen isn’t thinking about this at all.”

Love letters

Brubaker stressed that the clinic does not provide advice on financial matters – like how to access bank accounts or retirement funds. Fortunately, the designers of those systems have thought through what happens after someone dies, and there are policies and laws in place to help ensure their end-of -life needs are met, he said.

In a sense, the personal stories, family histories and cultural heritage embedded in our virtual heirlooms are even more valuable than material objects, he said.

He said he hopes his research and the new clinic will inspire tech companies to do more to preserve these digital treasures.

“One hundred years from now I hope no one cares what my bank account number was. But those text message threads - like modern-day love letters - or Instagram posts congratulating you on your wedding. Those matter. It would be a tragedy if all that is lost. We’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Get digital legacy support

CU’s Digital Legacy Clinic helps people take steps to preserve their own legacy or manage the virtual heirlooms of loved ones who have died.

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Floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee

Megan Maneval — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 15:57:39 +0000

Floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee Megan Maneval Fri, 11/15/2024 - 08:57

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

Fifty years after the famed “Rumble in the Jungle,” Muhammad Ali is remembered not only as the heavyweight champ but as a champion of civil rights.

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How did Trump do it? Political scientist weighs in

Daniel William Strain — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 18:19:11 +0000

How did Trump do it? Political scientist weighs in Daniel William… Tue, 11/12/2024 - 11:19

Daniel Strain

On Tuesday, Republican Donald Trump out-performed polls (again) to win election for a second, non-consecutive term as President of the United States. His party had a good night overall and retook control of the Senate, while the House of Representatives still hangs in the balance.

Janet Donavan, teaching professor in the Department of Political Science at ��ƷSM��ӰƬ, has been following the results and exit polls from those races closely. She gives her take on how Trump pulled off such a convincing victory, what’s next for the Democrats, and how people can manage their election-related anxiety.

How did Trump do it?

The evidence points to the fact that people were thinking about the economy and immigration. It was always going to be a tough road for Democrats because President Biden, who's the incumbent, had a low approval rating. People also feel that the economy is not doing well.

It turns out that the public was looking at those issues more than the issues Democrats really wanted them to look at. Democrats wanted to highlight democracy and some of the more extremist rhetoric that had come from the Trump campaign.

Janet Donavan

Were there any demographic differences from 2020 that surprised you?

One of the things that really doesn't surprise me, but that we should pay a lot of attention to, is the increasing divide in the United States between college educated Americans and Americans who don't have a college degree. People who have not obtained a college degree are much more likely to vote Republican, and people with a college degree are much more likely to vote Democratic.

In many ways, that is not a good thing for the country. It indicates that maybe people with college degrees are really out of touch with the experiences of the majority of Americans because most people don't have a college degree.

What stood out to you in races for the House and Senate?

The moderates in the Senate are largely gone, and they're being replaced by more polarized figures. Senator Manchin of West Virginia, for example, retired and was replaced by a conservative Republican. Senator Sinema of Arizona also retired, and the race to replace her is still too close to call. Whether it's going to be a very conservative Republican in Kari Lake or a fairly liberal Democrat in Ruben Gallego is not clear. But it’s not going to be the moderate Sinema.

A lot of commentators have pointed to what they’re calling a right-ward shift in politics around the country. How did that play out around Colorado?

It looks like the right-ward shift in politics is more pronounced in the eastern United States and particularly in the Midwest, but it doesn't seem as pronounced in the western United States.

The data are very preliminary, but my hunch is that the economy is better in the western United States than it is in the eastern United States. Another hunch is that immigration is seen more positively in the western United States than it is in the eastern United States.

Where are those hunches coming from?

The Colorado Political Climate Survey from the American Politics Research Lab just came out on Nov. 4. According to that, 50% of Coloradans agree those who migrate to the U.S. from other countries have a positive impact on the economy. We had a labor shortage right after COVID, and it was almost a relief to get people to come in and take jobs in Colorado. I'm not sure that was the case in other states.

If you were the head of the Democratic National Convention, what would you do to try to recoup from this shellacking?

Democrats need to look pretty hard at public opinion on some of the issues that they campaigned on. In particular, Democrats were hurt by not taking seriously people's concerns about inflation.

A lot of the economic indicators have been pretty good since the beginning of 2024 and even going back into 2023, but it hasn't hit people yet. When inflation goes up, prices tend to stay high. Wages are also sticky, which means that they don't go up as fast as prices. So even if the economy is in a recovering state, households themselves haven't recovered.

I think that Democrats need to listen and be more empathetic with the position that many Americans find themselves in of trying to pay the rent, pay the credit card bills, pay the grocery bills.

This election was stressful. How can people take care of their mental health?

I would say that we should all lay off the politics a little bit. That might sound a little funny coming from political science professor, but we don't need to spend 24 hours a day paying attention to news. Twenty minutes a day is probably enough to keep informed. After that, politics is a hobby, and if the hobby doesn't feel good, then you should probably stop.

How do you think we move forward from this election as a country?

I really think that it's important that we look at the lack of trust that we are seeing among the American people, and figure out ways to build hope, friendship and trust. We’ll see if that happens in the presidential administration. If it doesn't happen in the presidential administration, it's something that we can all work on in our communities.

Yesterday, I was sending pictures of my dog playing in the snow to people who voted differently than I did. We need to reconnect on things that aren't politics and rest because the next election is two years away.

Following Donald Trump’s victory this week, ��ƷSM��ӰƬ’s Janet Donavan breaks down how the president-elect beat the polls yet again—and how the nation can move forward after an especially divisive election.

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Then President Donald Trump at the White House in 2018. (Credit: White House)

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Then President Donald Trump at the White House in 2018. (Credit: White House)

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How did Trump do it? Political scientist weighs in

How did Trump do it?

Were there any demographic differences from 2020 that surprised you?

What stood out to you in races for the House and Senate?

A lot of commentators have pointed to what they’re calling a right-ward shift in politics around the country. How did that play out around Colorado?

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