No Going Back

NO GOING BACK NO GOING BACK

Expectations pushed, tested, and (im)proved

SUSAN THURSTON-HAMERSKI

John Coleman, CLA dean, often says the liberal arts are “front-page news.” It’s hard to think of another time when this statement has been more relevant. Through their research and teaching, CLA faculty are confronting the toughest problems we face: systemic racism, a changing workforce, healthcare inequality, misinformation, and more.

We asked six faculty members how their work is helping us make sense of our world and how campaign gifts make it possible to meet the moment and be our best for the world.

Being part of the solution

KATHRYN GRACE (Beverly and Richard Fink Liberal Arts Faculty Innovation Award recipient and associate professor of geography, environment, and society) embraces alternative perspectives to issues related to women’s health and development through the use of a quantitative, mixed-disciplinary approach. She examines the ways that individual, family, or household outcomes are conditioned by place, including both the culture and the natural environment. She explores the underlying theories of development, resource use, and access, building on her own personal experiences and observations from time spent in poor countries and communities.

My research in Africa brings new understanding around how women can access healthcare, including contraception, prenatal care, and care for infants and young children. There are really important system-level barriers that poor women with young children face—especially those women who heavily rely on small-scale farming for their food and income. I’ve been focused on linking all of those things together, and I gained a different perspective on these barriers during the pandemic.

During the pandemic, there were all of these new research questions that people and organizations needed me to help them answer (like how food security is affected by the combined impact of a pandemic and a poor agricultural season), and at the same time, I was also dealing with its impact on life at home. My youngest turned five early in the pandemic and like many others, we had no child care. And at the same time, I was still deeply committed to my scholarship and new research demands around people in the developing world who were nervous about how the pandemic was going to impact their lives.

Whether it’s things like vaccines or reproductive health care or humanitarian aid, too much of the message seems to be, “Oh, there’s a huge portion of the population that these services aren’t reaching.

For someone like me, a first-generation college student, who didn’t ever really think they fit in, to have a place that really supports you and thinks you have great ideas, that just feels great.

– KATHRYN GRACE

What’s wrong with those people?” The questions should be: What’s wrong with our system? How do we change the system?

What I’m really driven by is how women and poor people can contribute to building a system where they can access resources. This is a real issue across settings and institutions. When people aren’t using resources designed for them, how do we fix the system?

As a research community, we learned that we can do quite a few things remotely and successfully. It is definitely a different skillset, so we do have to stretch those muscles a bit by organizing meetings differently, for example. I have also been reminded, however, of how important it is to have those physical connections, especially with people from whom I’m trying to learn. It’s less important to be traveling domestically to catch up with some of my colleagues and established research networks; we can do a lot of that over Zoom. However, building and maintaining collaborative relationships with colleagues and community members who have limited internet or prefer more in-person engagement makes this a particularly challenging time. I do now have to discern (with my colleagues and teams) between what is required travel and what can be done remotely. In other words, I have to be more planful about how I’m going to use my time (and other people’s time) to accomplish the most important goals. At the end of the day, it’s been really hard to form the kinds of relationships that I need to with the collaborators and communities I work with in Africa and Southeast Asia.

I feel fully supported by the University. Were I to say, “I could really use this to help my research have more impact,” I feel the University’s response would be “Okay, how do we get that to you?” And for someone like me, a first-generation college student, who didn’t ever really think they fit in, to have a place that really supports you and thinks you have great ideas, that just feels great. Success means better understanding the problems that we face as a society, why they are there, and what we can do to make things better. We have made a lot of progress in understanding the general principles of the trade-offs between helping people and households and providing them with the right incentives to invest in themselves, save, work, and improve their lives. But there is still much that we need to examine, for instance, about

Why the net is important

MARIACRISTINA DE NARDI (Thomas Sargent Professor in Economics) is a sought-after expert on her area of research that explores wealth inequality, savings after retirement, the economic impact of life expectancy and medical expenses, and the economics of health and household structure. Formerly a senior economist and research advisor in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and a professor at University College London, De Nardi came to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in 2018 and to the University of Minnesota in 2019.

how families (rather than individuals) lead to the outcomes that we observe, including the participation of women in the workplace, starting from their reproductive years and beyond.

Success means better understanding these decisions and designing policy reforms that better take these mechanisms into account. For example, in my research, I find that the current structure of taxes and old-age Social Security greatly discourage married women from working and households from saving. Success would be discussing these aspects more and deciding whether we are aware of these magnitudes as a society and whether we want to change these incentives and how.

Because of funding I’ve received through the Thomas Sargent Professorship in Economics and the support of the Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute, I have started working not only with graduate students but also with undergraduate research assistants. I already knew how good our graduate students are, but our undergraduates were a revelation for me. We have a lot of talent at all levels in CLA, including some truly stellar undergraduates who are crazy smart, incredibly hard-working, passionate, whose curiosity to learn is never sated, and who really want to improve our society. Seeing these qualities in such young people makes me very optimistic about the future.

What scares me is polarized discussions and not keeping in mind that we are all in this together. What scares me is not having a constructive attitude, not having an open and frank discussion, and focusing on labels rather than issues. Ultimately, focusing on issues rather than labels is what makes a discussion move on to solutions and improvement. We need to understand what went wrong, including during the financial crisis, or the pandemic, to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Individually, we have to keep doing research at the highest levels, we have to keep investing in the quality of our teaching, to make an effort to share the results of research both to policy-making and social media, and, very importantly, we need to keep investing in our undergraduate and graduate students.

The pandemic revealed longstanding truths about our economy and the workers who drive it. It made clear the true importance of what we call essential workers. They perform the work that has to be done, and this became most obvious in healthcare and the food supply chain, from production to fast food and grocery stores. When we started looking in Minnesota, that classification included 70 percent of the workforce.

It has changed how we think about work. What keeps society running and what we traditionally thought of as the core of the economy is no longer primarily manufacturing. The pandemic made it clear that economic activity is not only about producing things but also about helping others who do things to go back to work.

In an industrial economy, it used to be more true that you could go into a factory unskilled and receive skills that allowed you to move into management. This was always a small minority of the workforce, but it was possible. Today, it’s pretty much impossible to go in as a food service worker or a janitor in a large institution, say a hospital, and gain skills in that position that would lead to your becoming a doctor. You would have to leave work, get a degree, and come back. As a result, we see a much greater social stratification now than we did late in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Those stratifications tend to fall along racial lines, which means that access to formal education is particularly important for African Americans and other people of color.

Recognizing the structural inequalities in our society is important. Too often we assume that all Americans have the same opportunities. But in reality, it is almost

We have a lot of talent at all levels in CLA, including some truly stellar undergraduates…. Seeing these qualities in such young people makes me very optimistic about the future.

– MARIACRISTINA DE NARDI

Revealing the value of the essential

WILLIAM P. JONES (Beverly and Richard Fink Liberal Arts Faculty Innovation Award recipient and professor of history) is a historian of the 20th-century United States, with particular interest in the relationship between race and class. Professor Jones has published books on African American industrial workers in the Jim Crow South and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. He is called upon often by the media for insights into the history of race, labor, and inequality.

Financial support makes three key things I need to do possible: exchange ideas, research the data, and collaborate.

– WILLIAM P. JONES impossible to move from one economic stratum to another. For the US compared to other wealthy countries, there are dramatic differences in economic mobility. Here, if you are born into a poor family the figures are abysmal for your prospects of becoming middle class.

I’ve spent years deeply engaged in research around work and inequality and the long history of race and capitalism. These topics are often not covered in national media and most of us are not used to seeing or hearing about them. We’ve seen intense resistance to this information that is powerful and deep-seated. The truths about inequality contradict our national myth of an egalitarian society, and to discuss structural inequality is often seen as unpatriotic. This is not surprising to most scholars, but to the broader public it is seen as dangerous.

The solutions to these conflicts are rooted in the liberal arts and, for me, through the work I am devoted to as a historian.

Financial support makes three key things I need to do possible: exchange ideas, research the data, and collaborate. To travel for archival research and present and share ideas with colleagues. It has allowed me to hire research assistants and to share results and get feedback from graduate students, leading to the training of another generation of scholars. And this is critical to understanding when we are in a position to address long-standing inequalities. To ask what are the sources of the limitations and how do we create access to formal training and other avenues that will help everyone achieve their dreams, have meaningful work?

What lies beneath

RICHARD LANDERS (John P. Campbell Professor in Industrial & Organizational Psychology and associate professor of psychology) directs the TNTLAB (Testing New Technologies in Learning, Assessment, and Behavior) where he and his team conduct research and work with organizations to understand the current role and the potential of the internet and related technologies to improve work. This research incorporates rigorous experimental and psychometric methods addressing how to improve organizations in relation to how they treat their employees, and they investigate the use of a range of technologies, including big data, gamification, virtual reality, video games, handheld devices (e.g., smartphones), online social networking, and web-based training.

The most immediate step we need to make things better, whether in private organizations or in society in general, is to build greater shared understanding of the challenges we face. This is one of the reasons it’s so important not to shortchange the liberal arts. A liberal arts education makes it clear how to look at subtext. What’s driving a lot of people’s behavior in the world today are the things they believe but don’t say or maybe even realize. The liberal arts help people say, “You’re telling me A, but I think you actually believe B. And let’s figure out why that’s happening and what it means, together.” That’s how the liberal arts support the good of society. We need more people who can go out into the world with that appreciation. We need more people willing to question their own beliefs and the beliefs of others, to be willing to grow together, to pursue outcomes that are actually better for everyone, instead of what’s just easiest or fastest.

One of my goals in the work that I’ve done has always been to challenge preconceived notions about what psychology is in order to expand our appreciation of and impact on these real-world issues, where things are not so simple as within the silo of a single perspective. When I go into the business world, I often find myself among executives and managers, each with their own biases, expertise, and training. From there, I need to develop a mutual understanding of the organization if I hope to make a difference. I understand that they are trying to make good deci-

sions, even when they’re not successful. Figuring out exactly who believes what and why, where past decisions came from, is critical.

Management really varies in terms of how diverse it is, not just in the demographic sense, but in terms of experiences and perspective, and a lack of diversity in a boardroom in all dimensions can really flavor the kinds of decisions they ultimately end up making. So for example, when I go into an organization and say, “The way you’re using artificial intelligence (AI) or the way you’re using games or the way you’re using social media in relation to the people you manage is harmful,” those in management don’t immediately push back. They don’t think that I’m there because of a purely quixotic reason or that it’s my personal mission to get rid of AI in an organization. My goal is to make things better for everyone, for both the organization and its employees.

It’s not just about buying a product and putting it in and looking for return on investment. There are often these other dimensions, these human dimensions, that they are missing. That is really the big advantage to this kind of approach and the kind of work that I do: Crossing the bridges that others can’t. That’s what the funding from my Campbell Professorship allows me to do. I can go to a computer scientist colleague and say, “I’d like to build this.” And they say, “Do you have money?” And then I can say, “Yes, I have the support to build a prototype.” That’s the key. Then we can use that prototype to make something bigger and to apply for grants to help us do even bigger projects still, which brings more funding to Minnesota for even more graduate students to devote their time to making the world a better place. Those resources make it much easier and more practical to open those doors, to overcome the barriers that others can’t cross. It’s easy to look at a former president and say, “Oh, he was terrible.” But it’s not just the president or the office of the presidency. I usually focus on the US Congress, and so I looked at our political institutions and what we were doing to prepare and respond to infectious diseases in general. The pandemic led me to look closely at how those policies in the past led to the polarization we’re seeing in the country. An Engdahl Family Research Award has helped me already in terms of hiring some research assistants to gather data and conduct analyses, so I can apply for even larger grants.

That is really the big advantage to the kind of work that I do: Crossing the bridges that others can’t. That’s what the funding allows me to do.

– RICHARD LANDERS

To make sure this just doesn’t happen again

MICHAEL MINTA (Engdahl Family Faculty Award recipient and professor of political science) is one of the country’s leading experts in the study of the political representation of African American, Latino, and women’s interests in the United States. His most recent book No Longer Outsiders: Black and Latino Interest Group Advocacy on Capitol Hill focuses on racial and ethnic politics, minority interest group advocacy, and how to elevate these voices within traditional politics. His focus on minority politics became more salient with the reality of the pandemic.

For me, it’s trying to figure out what happened and what we can do to prepare. This is really a good opportunity to make some changes, especially with public health.

– MICHAEL MINTA

Part of my goal as a researcher and academic is to address these questions and we don’t have to take the approach of who’s to blame. Most of the time it’s usually everyone. It’s not just the president, not just the House Democrats or Senate Republicans. It’s usually just a failing of the system. For me, it’s trying to figure out what happened and what we can do to prepare. This is really a good opportunity to make some changes, especially with public health.

I’m trying to figure out a way to look at this issue in a nonpartisan way, to provide information and identify some solutions that Congress or maybe the executive branch can use and develop some mechanisms where politics don’t necessarily get in the way of addressing infectious diseases in general, and particularly a pandemic.

We just had the census, and now you’re going to start seeing the parties that are controlling the process try to draw favorable districts for themselves to protect their incumbents. You just don’t want Democrats drawing districts where it’s all going to be Democrats. You don’t want Republicans drawing districts where it’s just going to all be Republicans. You want to have some type of fairness and give people with different ideas and policy preferences a chance to have their voices heard, to win elections.

You may have a belief about something. But there’s someone else who has another belief, and then you want to see, how does it match up? So, we keep talking, asking questions, and the answer can change depending on the question. Just because it’s in a book doesn’t mean it’s the truth. You have to interrogate it because people like to slant things all of the time. You might like to think that in a class, you’re going to get the right answer. But there may not be a right answer or maybe we don’t even know the answer at all. Maybe that’s the whole point.

The truth does set you free

EMILY VRAGA (Don and Carole Larson Professorship in Health Communication and associate professor of journalism and mass communication) asks questions about how people come to learn about issues of public importance and the ways in which communication can foster a better society. Her research focuses on how people come to understand news and information on contentious health, science, and political issues, and especially on how people navigate disagreement about these issues and misinformation on a range of health topics on social media.

I love asking (and sometimes answering) questions about how people come to learn about issues of public importance and the ways in which communication can foster a better society. More specifically, my research focuses on how people come to understand news and information on contentious health, science, and political issues, and especially on how people navigate disagreement about these issues and misinformation on a range of health topics on social media. How do we interpret information that does not agree with our predispositions? What can we do to ensure we are accurately distinguishing between high-quality and low-quality information online? How can we recognize and correct misinformation when we see it? How do we communicate with others who have differing viewpoints or who may be misinformed about a topic?

The digital media environment has made it even more important to understand how audiences respond to and perceive fragmented and ever-more diverse media messages. Because we have frequently seen posts from people who are different from us—the distant friends, family, and acquaintances that we friend or follow on social media, but do not often communicate with offline— there is the potential for exposure to more diverse views on social media than in other spaces.

There are so many possible uses of social media—my own work has examined how protest movements are using social media for online activism, the prevalence of health and political misinformation and correction on social media, and the norms of online expression when it comes to discussing contentious topics.

I focus on research that addresses practical problems that arise from social media use among a public that feels more divided than ever. I investigate methods to encourage more high-quality information consumption and production on social media. Although misinformation on social media is a real problem, seeing corrections of health misinformation on social media can be effective in reducing misperceptions among those seeing the interaction. These corrections can come from expert organizations, from the platforms themselves, and from ordinary unknown social media users, offering a space where the public can serve to improve the information environment. Therefore, immediate correction offers a useful tool to react to misinformation on social media.

In addition, news literacy may offer a proactive solution that can be deployed to build a more resilient population. My work into news literacy suggests that reminding people of their own biases can help them be more fair news consumers, but it can be difficult to encourage skepticism of misinformation without generating cynicism towards all information. Additionally, news literacy messages can also sometimes reinforce partisan divides. While news literacy holds promise, more work needs to be done to consider how news literacy knowledge intersects with self-efficacy, perceptions of social norms, and attitudes to encourage people to respond to misinformation and be receptive to corrections when they see them online.

The digital media environment has made it even more important to understand how audiences perceive fragmented and ever-more diverse media messages.

– EMILY VRAGA