Project Abstract
The past three years has witnessed a proliferation of state level legislation aimed at regulating the teaching of the history of race and racism (often termed “critical race theory”) in K-12 classrooms. These state level conflicts have also filtered into local politics, particularly surrounding school board elections. This project aims to understand regional and intergenerational political dynamics surrounding the teaching of the history of race and racism in schools, drawing on frameworks for understanding policy feedback, backlash, and frontlash. Specifically we will use the funding from this seed grant to pilot a survey of parents and adolescents to help better understand the implications of these policy changes for political views and democratic participation. This is the part of a broader project that examines how this national and state level issue has reshaped local politics across jurisdictions.
Investigators
Tabitha Bonilla
Tabitha Bonilla is Associate Professor in Human Development and Social Policy and Faculty Fellow of IPR. She researches how identity and communication around social movements, politics, and policy influence voter opinions and behavior. In particular, her work focuses on how messaging polarizes attitudes or can bridge attitudinal divides with substantive focuses on important topics in American politics ranging from BLM, gun control, human trafficking, and immigration. She uses a mixed methods approach in much of her work, though most often uses survey data to examine how the public understands the world around them. Her current book projects push forward our understanding of how identity (whether a candidate’s or voter’s) influences voter interpretation of information and subsequent consequences for representation and accountability.
Chloe Thurston
Chloe Thurston is associate professor of political science and IPR Faculty Fellow. Her research is at the intersection of American political development and political economy, and has focused on the development of social and economic policies, interest groups and social movements, institutional change, and challenges of historical analysis. She is author of At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination and the American State (Cambridge, 2018), and co-author of The Political Development of American Debt Relief (Chicago, forthcoming). Prior to coming to Northwestern in 2014, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. In 2019-20, she was a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.