Dehumanization of Palestinians in the press
Israel’s war in Gaza has heightened interest in the nature and prevalence of dehumanizing rhetoric. Dehumanizing language can both signal and reflect dehumanization, and thus serves as an important warning sign. We have developed several different metrics for measuring how much dehumanizing text appears in the coverage of Palestinians, as compared to Israelis, in the press of several different countries (including Israel itself).
Illustration: Voice of America, https://picryl.com/media/destroyed-gaza-area-1507b5, Wikimedia commons license
European solidarity
How strong is solidarity across the European Union, and how might we measure it? With whom do Europeans tend to feel solidarity, and why? Does solidarity mean different things to different people? All of these questions are crucial to the long-term prospects of European integration, and all are resistant to easy measurement. We use large corpora of texts about Europe, about countries in Europe, and about regions within a country to try to home in on the meaning and implications of solidarity in these different contexts.
Illustration: Fabien Vienne ‘Cooperation Intereuropeenne’
Framing migrants and refugees
Migration is a thorny political issue almost everywhere. How are public opinion and policy choices affected by the way people think about migrants? Our research looks the media’s role in framing migrants as similar to or different from refugees or survivors of cross-border human trafficking; how celebrity involvement in public debates may change perceptions; and how political leaders may drive waves of public interest or concern.
Photo: Mstyslav Chernov (Wikimedia Commons, 43060174, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Media coverage of foreign and minority groups
Do the media cover different groups of people differently? When they write about minority groups, does the average tone (positive, negative, etc.) of articles change? Do they frame similar issues in different ways depending on whether the group involved is domestic or foreign? Do any of these patterns change over time? We address these questions by collecting and analyzing corpora of hundreds of thousands of articles about different groups and comparing and contrasting their contents.
Legislative debates on foreign policy
We focus in particular on foreign aid policy. While development agencies largely control individual project decision, national legislatures (the U.S. Congress, the British Parliament, etc.) generally have considerable influence over broad policy outlines. Our goal is to identify the arguments for or against foreign aid that shape legislative outcomes, and to uncover patterns over time and across donor states in the salience of particular arguments. These patterns, in turn, can be used to improve our understanding of aid policy decision-making.
Photo: David Iliff - European Parliament, 2014. (CC BY-SA 3.0)