Author: TheConversation

By Anjana Susarla, Professor of Information Systems, Michigan State University What do a cybersecurity researcher building a system to generate alerts for detecting security threats and vulnerabilities, a wildfire watcher who tracks the spread of forest fires, and public health professionals trying to predict enrollment in health insurance exchanges have in common? They all rely on analyzing data from Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging service, meaning it’s designed for sharing posts of short segments of text and embedded audio and video clips. The ease with which people can share information among millions of others worldwide on Twitter has made...

By Atiba Ellis, Professor of Law, Marquette University In Travis County, Texas, home to Austin, a local Republican Party official allegedly knocked on people’s doors in November 2022 to accuse people who cast ballots by mail of having been ineligible to vote. In Beaumont, Texas, 300 miles east, White poll workers allegedly followed Black voters to voting machines and stood close enough behind them to see how they voted. In North Carolina, several people allegedly photographed or video-recorded voters. In Arizona, armed citizens had stationed themselves near ballot drop boxes, but a federal judge ordered them to stay away...

By Reya Farber, Assistant Professor of Sociology, William & Mary While transgender people might be more culturally recognized in the U.S. than ever, visibility is not the same as justice. Transgender is an umbrella category that emerged in the U.S. in the 1990s to encompass diverse gender identities that don’t fully correspond with an individual’s assigned sex at birth. Although local communities worldwide have adopted this term, it can also erase and collapse other diverse gender identities people have used across time, location and culture. People who are today called trans, nonbinary and intersex have existed for centuries throughout...

By Julian C. Chambliss, Professor of English, Michigan State University As someone who teaches and writes about Afrofuturism, I eagerly awaited the release of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” I was particularly excited about the introduction of Namor and the hidden kingdom of Talokan, which he leads. The first “Black Panther” film adhered to a longstanding practice in Afrofuturist stories and art by engaging in what I call “acts of recovery” – the process of reviving and celebrating elements of Black culture that were destroyed or suppressed by colonization. This practice is often linked to “Sankofa,” an African word from...

By Jin Lee, Research Fellow, Curtin University; and Crystal Abidin, Associate Professor & ARC DECRA Fellow, Internet Studies, Curtin University Anyone who has scrolled through YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram would not be surprised to glance upon calming minimalist aesthetics of Korean cafe decor, pilgrimages to the locations of popular K-dramas, and even the polite decorum of Korean public transport commuters. In South Korea, oegugin (foreign-national) influencers often produce social media content focused on the global interest in K-pop, K-drama and K-film for audiences inside and out of Korea. These influencers are most prominent on YouTube, where the most popular...

By Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Harvard Kennedy School Now that he is in the 2024 presidential race, the media circus that is Donald Trump is returning for a new season. Trump is still newsworthy. He has been weakened by his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, his attempt to overthrow its result and the underperformance of Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms. Nevertheless, Trump is more than a party leader. “Make America Great Again,” known colloquially as “MAGA,” is a political movement. Trump has a legion of diehard followers. Then there is Trump...