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Glasscock Summer Research Fellows 2022

This fellowship was offered for the purpose of supporting faculty and graduate research from within the Texas A&M community, as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to impede research activities. Each fellowship is entitled to a faculty member and allows a graduate student worker a full-time GAR position during the 3 summer months. 2022 Summer Research Fellows […]

This fellowship was offered for the purpose of supporting faculty and graduate research from within the Texas A&M community, as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to impede research activities. Each fellowship is entitled to a faculty member and allows a graduate student worker a full-time GAR position during the 3 summer months.

2022 Summer Research Fellows

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Dr. Johanna Dunaway | Associate Professor, Political Science

Johanna L. Dunaway received her Ph.D. from Rice University in 2006. Before joining the faculty of Texas A&M in Fall 2016, Johanna was a Joan Shorenstein Fellow in the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in media and politics, political communication, political behavior, American politics, and research design. Her areas of research include news media and politics and political communication, with an emphasis on how the changing media environment is shaping news consumption and political knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Her publications appear in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Political Communication, Information, Communication & Society, Public Opinion Quarterly, and PloS One. Johanna’s recent book, Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization, co-authored with Joshua Darr and Matthew Hitt, was published as part of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Political Communication series in 2021. Her forthcoming book, News and Democratic Citizens in the Mobile Era, co-authored with Kathleen Searles, will be published with Oxford University Press in October, 2022. Her current book project, The House that Fox Built? Representation, Political Accountability, and the Rise of Cable News, is co-authored with Kevin Arceneaux, Martin Johnson, & Ryan J. Vander Wielen.

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Spencer Goidel | PhD candidate, Political Science

Spencer Goidel is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Political Science at Texas A&M. He received his BA from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2018. His research and teaching interests include public opinion, voter behavior, and political communication. He has published work in Public Opinion Quarterly, Research & Politics, and PS: Political Science & Politics. Spencer received the Rapoport Family Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Survey Research Grant for his research on choice overload in U.S. elections. He is currently working on completing his dissertation by May 2023.

Project Title: “Internet inequality, online surveys, and polling error in US elections”

Project Description:
Our research examines the relationship between high speed internet access and election polling error. We demonstrate how digital information inequalities can have important political implications for the accuracy with which polling data reflect voters’ prospective candidate evaluations relative to Election Day outcomes. Specifically, we use data from the 2016, 2018, and 2020 U.S. election cycles to examine whether variation in the quality of internet access—in conjunction with several other factors—helps to explain gaps between polling projections and the actual vote shares candidates earn on Election Day. We show that, while most Americans have internet access, internet quality continues to be a meaningful divide, that these inequalities in quality are negatively affecting sample representativeness, and this is causing an increase in polling error. It is necessary that public opinion scholars accurately gauge public opinion. Yet, the past two presidential elections are suggestive of many shortcomings. Our research points to one reason---poor internet quality---scholars and pollsters are experiencing such difficulty.

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Dr. Sergio Lemus | Assistant Professor, Anthropology

Lemus is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Previously, Lemus was part of the inaugural ACES Fellow cohort class of 2019. In his research agenda, Lemus documents the centrality of labor processes in driving cultural transformations among Mexican migrants and the politico-historical changes that give rise to a working-class formation—Los Yarderos. This research is slated to be published as a book at the University of Illinois Press under Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest series titled “Los Yarderos: Mexican Yard Workers in Neoliberal Chicago.” Lemus’ second research project examines the lives of Mexican, working-class immigrants and their cultural experience living with cancer. This research acutely points to the neoliberal, necropolitical, and cultural forms that give rise to the Latino/a cancer patient as a manageable population in the United States. In general, Lemus’ projects emphasize the study of immigration along three lines of investigation: a) Mexican transborder subjectivity, b) cultural production and reproduction, and c) health and disease as these relate to class, gender, and unstable state regimes.

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Aigul Seralinova | PhD candidate, Anthropology

Aigul Seralinova has more than ten years of experience working with International Organizations in Kazakhstan in the area of social and economic development and poverty reduction. She led projects/initiatives to improve analytical capacity to measure poverty and develop an inclusive pro-poor policy for the country. She holds a Master’s Degree in Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis. She was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship in 2009. Aigul worked with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Programmed Office in Astana, Kazakhstan as a Senior Program Assistant, conducting projects related to gender equality, combating human trafficking and domestic violence before the start of the Ph.D. program in Cultural Anthropology at Texas A&M University.

Project Title: Ethnography of Latina/o Cancer Patients in Brazos County

Project Description:
The project documents how undocumented Mexican men use alternative forms of medicine and navigate between biomedical and non-traditional forms of healing to capture better how Mexican migrants culturally mediate their medical subjectivity in precarious, neoliberal conditions. This ethnographic research project takes place in Brazos County among Latina/o populations. Brazos County is central Texas’ region is an important ethnographic site for three reasons---1) there is a strong presence of migrants from Latin America as well as US-born Latinos or Hispanics, and 2) this population is representative of more significant trends nationally in terms of working-class composition and undocumented status, and 3) Brazos County is home of two major regional hospitals and cancer treatment centers that allow for the contact with patients suffering from this disease.

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Dr. Lu Tang | Associate Professor, Communication

Dr. Lu Tang is an Associate Professor of Health Communication. She is also the Director of the Data Justice Lab affiliated with the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science. Dr. Tang conducts research on social media and emerging infectious diseases using computational methods such as natural language processing and social network analysis. She also studies culture, health communication, and minority health using mixed methods such as surveys, interviews and photovoice methods. Her ongoing projects seek to identify biases and other barriers of minority that contributes to health disparity. Her research has been published in journals such as Journal of Health CommunicationHealth CommunicationJournal of Applied Communication ResearchJournal of International and Intercultural CommunicationJournalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and Journal of Medical Internet Research.

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Jinxu Li | PhD candidate, Communication

Jinxu Li is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of health communication, social media, and mixed methods. Her current research includes identifying mental health stigma and reducing AI medical bias in underprivileged populations.

Project Title: “Ethics in Medical AI”

Project Description:
Recent years have witnessed the use of artificial intelligence in decision-making in numerous areas of society, including medical research and health care. While AI research accelerates the scientific community’s understanding of human physiology and medicine, it also has important potential ethical pitfalls. For instance, in medical AI research, the training datasets used in AI research are often predominantly drawn from the Caucasian population and men, which creates biases in the findings as well as the generalizability of such research. In health care, many decisions about the approval of treatment are based on AI-based computer systems, and members of marginalized populations are much less likely to be approved for innovative treatments. In this project, we seek to understand how ethics are constructed and understood in medical AI research.