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About
Our Research Team has been meeting since 2005 to examine questions of communication and civil society…
Contact Usfocusing on public engagement, political consumerism, contentious politics, and the possibility of civic repair.
Our recent attention has shifted to the politics of resentment, the rise of populism, and growing political polarization and contentiousness.
In 2016
- Right wing populist movements in Britain, aided by a campaign of misinformation, successfully pushed for Brexit.
- A right wing populist, Donald Trump, won the presidency of the United States, partly by dominating news coverage
Since 2016
- Right wing populist movements consolidated power in Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Brazil.
- Populists won parliamentary seats in Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands.
In 2018
- Many U.S. states shifted control back to Democrats or moderate Republicans, suggesting a “Blue Wave”
- Left-leaning candidates won governorships in Illinois, Michigan, Kansas, Maine, Wisconsin, and Nevada.
Since 2018
- Republican legislatures losing majorities in Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin try to limit voting the power of incoming Democratic governors.
- Multiple presidential battleground states saw fights between Democratic governors and GOP legislatures over how to reopen their economies amid COVID-19.
Our Story
It’s rare when we get to bring such an illustrious and diverse group of scholars, and even more rare when they can inform the thinking around an ambitious project at its early stages. That is what this conference did for our work on Wisconsin’s communication ecology and political contention. The almost immediate transfer of knowledge into research efforts fostered a rapid rate of discovery. ~Dhavan Shah
Since 2016, the Communication and Contentious Politics Project has received grants totaling some $683K.
$411,000 from the University of Wisconsin in the WARF Discovery Competition, $150,000 from the Hewlett Foundation, $72,000 from the Tommy Thompson Center, and $50,000 from the Damm Fund of the Journal Foundation to support its study of political contention and communication ecologies in Wisconsin and other states.
As of 2019, an additional $1,085,409 in funding has been raised. New Grants: John S. and James L. Knight Foundation: $1,000,000; UW-Madison Fall Research Competition Grant: $55,409. Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center: $30,000; Jean Monnet European Union Centre of Excellence.
Faculty Organizers
Mike Wagner
Michael Wagner is a Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He holds affiliations with the Department of Political Science and the La Follette School of Public Affairs.
Wagner’s research explores how elements of the information environment interact with individual-level factors to affect people’s political preferences, partisanship, and behaviors. His research has been published in outlets such as Journal of Communication, Annual Review of Political Science and Journalism & Communication Monographs and has been funded by organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Dirksen Congressional Center, and the Carnegie-Knight Foundation.
Dhavan Shah
Dhavan V. Shah is Maier-Bascom Professor at the University of Wisconsin, where he is Director of the Mass Communication Research Center (MCRC) and Scientific Director in the Center for Health Enhancement System Studies (CHESS).
His work concerns framing and cueing effects on social judgments, digital media influence on civic and political engagement, and the impact of ICTs on chronic disease management. Across these domains of work, he has increasingly applied computational techniques to tackle social science questions. He is housed in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, with appointments in Industrial and Systems Engineering, Marketing, and Political Science.
Lewis Friedland
Lewis A. Friedland is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and an affiliated professor in the Department of Sociology.
He founded and directs the Center for Communication and Democracy. His research and teaching centers on civic and citizen journalism, communication and society, communication research methods, international news reporting, and civil society and public life. His current research is in three major areas: youth civic engagement and the lifeworld of young people; community media ecologies and civic and public life; and the theory of communicative action. His publications include three books and numerous journal articles and chapters.
Kathy Cramer
Katherine Cramer is a professor in the Department of Political Science, and an affiliate of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the LaFollette School of Public Affairs, and various campus institutes and centers.
Her work focuses on the way people in the United States make sense of politics and their place in it. Her book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, examines rural resentment toward cities and its implications for contemporary politics. She also wrote Talking about Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference, and Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life.
Christopher Wells
Chris Wells is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism at Boston University
He studies how citizens become informed and engaged through digital media, the civic identity and communication preferences of youth and young adults, problems of misinformation and biased information processing, and how social media datasets can inform our understanding of politics and activism. He also works on the problem of understanding the many flows of information and content to which digital citizens are now exposed, and how those flows influence perceptions and actions.
Karl Rohe
Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
He studies the statistical performance of computationally tractable estimation and sampling techniques for network data analysis and works on https://murmuration.wisc.edu.
His work has appeared in Annals of Statistics, Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, and Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. He received his PhD from University of California, Berkeley where he received the Evelyn Fix Memorial Prize. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.
Bill Sethares
Ph.D. Degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
He has worked at the Raytheon Company designing image processing systems and is currently Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Prof Sethares has held visiting positions at the Australian National University, at the Technical Institute in Gdansk, Poland, at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountainview CA, and is currently a scientific researcher at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. His research interests include adaptation and learning in speech and signal processing, decision and estimation in imaging and audio systems, and text and language processing for social media. Dr. Sethares is the author of five books, and he holds 6 patents.
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Grad Students
Sadie Dempsey
Doctoral Student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Her research interests lie at the intersection of social movements, political sociology, and civic life.
Sadie specializes in qualitative methods and is the co-founder of the qualitative methods research group in Sociology.
She works as a Project Assistant with the Civic Culture and Contentious Politics group where she has the opportunity to travel across the state of Wisconsin to interview people about how they make sense of politics in their daily life.
Jordan Foley
Doctoral Candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison
He serves as the Assistant Director of the UW debate team.
He earned his M.A. in Communication Studies from Wake Forest University with an emphasis on rhetoric, democratic deliberation, and political communication.
His research focuses on political information flows on and across digital media platforms over time and their implications for civic engagement and democratic life. Jordan’s approach brings together content-coded event data, news coverage, and social media posts thematic discourse analysis to analyze the flow of information surrounding contentious political
Ceri Hughes
Recent Graduate and Visiting Lecturer at Brunel and Middlesex Universities
He gained both his undergraduate degree and an MA in Political Communication from Cardiff University, Wales.
His work focuses on the study of minor political parties and the role that media play in promoting (or not) these alternative views. He has published work on newspaper coverage of the UK Green Party and the prominence of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in the British political communication ecology prior to Brexit.
A further area of research interest is the role of religious discourse within the political realm, a recently published paper on this found the surprising, and perhaps concerning, conclusion that President Donald Trump uses religious language in public addresses at a significantly higher rate than any predecessor from the last one hundred years.
Jianing Li
Ph.D Student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Her research centers on the transmission, consequences and correction of misinformation and misperceptions in new communication ecologies.
Her past and ongoing research projects include linguistic and network analyses of “fake news” discourse on Twitter, differential effects of public informedness of political facts on belief updating and debiasing, and the influence of fact-checking journalism on public’s understanding of issues important for civic life, etc.
Her recent work appears in Political Communication and Social Media + Society.
Josephine Lukito
Ph.D Candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication
She studies discourse related to foreign policy and international relations in the U.S. public sphere.
Jo specializes in computational and quantitative analyses of language, especially combined with qualitative data or analyses.
Jo’s ongoing work studies Russian disinformation in the United States and news coverage of global trade relations. She holds Ph.D minors in English linguistics (syntax) and political science (international relations).
Jiyoun Suk
Ph.D Student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Her principal research interests lie in examining how local context and national events shape the networked communication ecology and influence individual-level political outcomes such as expression, social and institutional trust, and participation.
She uses contextual, computational, and public opinion data to triangulate research methods, with the goal of identifying the factors that affect networked communication flows and dynamics.
Zhongkai Sun
Ph.D. Student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
He is now working as a Project Assistant in the CCCP group, committed to news media data collection and analysis.
His research work is about learning advanced machine learning algorithms for multi-modal (text, audio, and video) language analysis, including sentiment analysis and emotion recognition.
Besides, he is also working on applying Natural Language Processing methods to social media data analysis.