Join us for research presentations from Annenberg School of Communication PhD students:

Rohan Grover
“Encoding Privacy: How Tech Workers Shape Data Protection Regulations”

When privacy regulations transition from the policy arena to tech companies for compliance, how do technical workers' attitudes and experiences shape how their implementation? This study draws on semi-structured interviews with 13 technical workers who were responsible for GDPR and/or CCPA compliance to unpack data protection compliance as a social process. It identifies common findings across diverse organizational environments to illustrate how tech workers are uniquely empowered to shape how "privacy" is enacted in the field.

Paul Sparks
"Reducing" Affective Polarization Increases Politically Motivated Reasoning”

Political polarization is a topic of great interest among academics and the general public, but a growing body of research suggests that while Democrats and Republicans express more consistent issue positions, the general public (as opposed to elites) has not become more politically extreme. At the same time, longitudinal survey data shows an increasing tendency for partisans in the general public to express animus toward members of the opposing party — so called affective polarization — but the relationship between affective polarization and issue polarization is unclear. In three experiments, my research shows that an intervention designed to "reduce" affective polarization actually primes politically motivated reasoning through social identity-related processes, thereby prompting stronger expressions of own-party aligned political positions.

Jessica Hatrick
“Carcerality and the University: A Critical and Discursive Analysis of Social Media”

This project looks to give university students a voice in understanding the university as a policing agent in Los Angeles. The primary objective of this project is to analyze and compare the discourse about campus policing on universities’ Reddit pages with the data from abolitionist student collective’s Instagram pages. In doing so it hopes to answer RQ1: how do abolitionist students see the university differently from the general student body?