 I'm Scott Oswald, I'm the Creative Director of the MIT Education Arcade, but I'm turning the floor over to Vick Bald, who is our Director of Graduate Studies, and he'll be doing the introduction. Great. Thank you for coming. Thank you. So it's my great pleasure to introduce Laura Partain tonight. Laura is a visiting lecturer in our department in comparative media studies this year, specifically in civic and global media. So Laura is a media effects scholar whose work focuses on understanding the complex news and social media effects on marginalized communities' access to sociopolitical material and medical resources. Her scholarship is located at the interstices of citizenship status and national belonging. Laura's research uses experimental analyses to develop media interventions for prejudice reduction and focuses on the media effects of racial, religious, and ethnic identity representations. Laura has worked with communities in Syria, the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iran, but also works with these communities who are forcibly displaced in diaspora, that is refugees and asylum seekers, as well as with Arab and Muslim Americans more broadly. Her training in critical study is in critical studies, and her use of interview and survey methods grounds her work within these communities' experiences, while necessarily considering these communities in relation to geopolitics and other transnational solidarity movements. She is a PhD candidate in Indiana University's media school, holds an MA in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas Austin, and graduated with a BA in religious studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Laura is also a fellow in the Muslim Women and the Media Institute through a Henry Luce grant at UC Davis, and I'm going to hand it over to Laura. Welcome. I said, great. Thank you so much, Vivek. Can I go ahead and share my screen now so that I can launch right into my PowerPoint? Wonderful. Okay. So, I'm now screen sharing, and there we go. Can everyone see, is everything good? Okay. So, I have a lot to get through. There may be certain points where I kind of briefly touch on the slides and then move on. If you have any questions about what I've moved on from quickly or skipped over entirely, please feel free to ask me about those slides or that information in the Q&A session. So this project that I'm going to be discussing today is called Dynamic Exchanges. So this project really came out of the 2015-2016 presidential election cycle and the rhetoric that occurred during that election cycle, but also very much so the policies and the facilitation of certain policies that happened once Donald Trump was elected to president. So, one of the first things that Donald Trump did after his election to the presidency was he put out executive order 13-769, and this order effectively banned communities from Muslim majority countries, and this is why it became known as the quote unquote Muslim ban. And it became known as this primarily because it seemingly inconsistently and randomly selected certain countries to be banned from entrance to the United States while allowing other Muslim majority countries to still have access to immigration or to visit the United States. So the goal of this was according to the White House to protect the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States. So along with this order, very shortly thereafter, Donald Trump also talked a lot about the preferred immigrants or desired immigrants that he would like to come to the United States, and he would or he put those in a binary between the shithole countries, which he most commonly talked about, for example, like Haiti, or other countries on the African continent, and then Norway. And so he really created this binary between them that the only conceivable way to understand the binary was through a lens of race. And this comment or this dialogue that he started on these countries was followed up by his immigration or his head of immigration, Kevin Cuccinelli, giving us a rewrite on the Statue of Liberty's kind of infamous symbolism in that he said, she really should be saying, give me your tired and your poor can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge. So with this kind of whole set of rhetoric coming out and the public charge order being put in place, this resulted in a number of on the ground effects for certain marginalized communities such that especially immigrants became nervous and in some instances would try to take their children off like their health care because they would be worried that that would disqualify them from being able to have access to permanent residency or to get a green card. This had additional effects on their access to food stamps, cash assistance, public housing programs. And right now, we can see the way that this rhetoric and subsequently the policies that came out of this rhetoric have had repercussions for these communities, specifically immigrant communities, those who are undocumented, but also those who are, for example, asylum seekers. And it has kind of created this freeze on them not knowing whether they could or could not seek health care assistance for COVID or during the period of the pandemic. And immigration websites in the US have taken to putting a lot more information up online that tries to assure people that they can seek assistance. But I'm bringing this up because of the way that my work in particular at this stage is seeking to really analyze the immediate rhetorical effects on audiences and to then be able to take that information and see how it translates into public policy and then kind of dictates or restricts certain access to resources. So we are most of us are probably quite familiar with the rhetoric that occurred during the election cycle. These images represent some of the rhetoric that was used to discuss Syrian refugees ranging from Ben Carson saying that Syrian refugees were like a rabid dog to the very frequently used idea that Syrian refugees were acting as a Trojan horse for ISIS. And so this type of rhetoric was very common and even still kind of perpetuates the discourse on Syrian refugees. There also, so while there was not necessarily as much discourse on Palestinians in this last election cycle, there has historically been quite a bit of discourse that has fundamentally excluded the voices of Palestinians as well as ignored some of their some of their demands or desires for self determination during presidential debates. And even though Donald Trump did not discuss Palestinians or really as much Israel during his presidential election cycle, since he took office, he has moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv and Israel to Jerusalem. And he's also put out the deal of the century, along with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, that again did not seek the input of any Palestinian voices and by and large ignored or inappropriately addressed historical conditions for Palestinians, some sort of Palestinian peace deal with Israel. So this research done that I'm presenting to you today is called Dynamic Exchanges, because as I've demonstrated briefly already, but what I want to hit home today is that when a news media object or a news media product or a media product in general is put out, that there isn't just one instance or one site of consumption that happens. That oftentimes what we see is that something is put out in the media and then you have a certain audience who consumes that and then that audience may react to that object or product in their consumption and then reproduce it again for other people to consume or respond to. So what happens is you typically have this cycle of different sites of production consumption and then reproduction and all of these impact the rhetoric that immigrants, that Middle Eastern and Arab communities navigate every day. And I just briefly want to point out that I do use the phrase Middle Eastern. There are also other phrases that some people that are somewhat contentious. I know that Middle Eastern, for example, to some people, they see it as a reflection of colonial discourse. And unfortunately, a lot of the terms we use are imperfect. And but for the sake of being able to have this discussion and refer to a specific area today, I'm going to use Middle Eastern. So I will be talking about the cycle that I'm referring to and the question that I developed to address this cycle is what are the news media facts of presidential rhetoric and policy at different sites of a media cycle? So I'll address this through an experiment that I conducted. This experiment was with native born US citizens who turned out to be about 87% white. Then I conducted a survey with Palestinian and Syrian Americans. And in that survey presented to them the results of the experiment, as well as sought their feedback on the original news object. And then I also conducted interviews with Syrian Americans and Palestinian American artists to get a better in depth look at some of the responses to the media ecosphere and to better understand the types of production or artistry that they put out in light of the rhetoric. So I'm going to give a brief project introduction. So this project examines established differences in the US historical narrative that privilege legible otherness often represented through assumed visual markers. Differences such as race and nationality contribute to in-group and out-group stereotypes that mobilize political and social marginalization. Despite the supposed coherency of in-group and out-group divisions, this project raises research questions that examines degrees of such divisions, creating a comparative analysis between communities that are often subsumed into the single category of Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim. This work offers a complicated look into the embeddedness of ideological messages about race, religion, and national belonging within US culture. Seemingly incoherent, my results on race, nationality, and religion are decipherable through a lens of whiteness that upholds historical systems of oppression. I assess these results through a framework of what my research has constructed as a quote-unquote politics of gratitude, which I term as a set of extrajudicial expectations that native-born US citizens or native-born citizens place on a immigrant or refugee. Using this construct to demonstrate how the figure of the Arab enforced migrant disrupt established hierarchies in US social space and how US religion and racial systems are two integral points through which subsequent marginalization occurs. So some of the relevant theories that I use throughout my research, of which I previously had kind of interspersed throughout my slides, but I realized that it would be best just to put it at the beginning so everyone can kind of understand where I'm going with some of this. So I use something called social identity theory, and I talked a lot about in my introduction in-groups and out-groups, and social identity in theory really informs the ways that we inform the process of how we construct or why we construct those in-groups and out-groups. So this theory is premised on the idea that our individuals desire to have a positive self-concept, concept and manage or improve their self-esteem accordingly. There are negative or positive attributes associated with varying social group categories, and these associations are relevant to one's own self-concept. So when one has an in-group and one has an out-group, there are going to be different ideas that are attributed to one group versus the other group, and the idea here is that those concepts or those attributions can be that it affects the way that one sees oneself and one sees one's in-group. Right, so third, social groups are not inherently positive or negative, but accrue these evaluations based on comparisons to other social groups. So the idea really is that we all want to have a positive self-concept, and therefore we want to have our group, the groups that we belong to, have a positive construct as well. I also talk about something that is not technically called museumization, but I label it as such. It's from Chakra Bharti, and he discusses the way that whiteness establishes itself as the authority of voice in teleological global development, and this is really necessary for my work in thinking about ideas of progress or liberalism and how within this construct communities such as from the Middle East are always put as always already behind and failing to live up to a set of expectations because of this design and in development. So I also use theories on whiteness to really inform my work, and whiteness defined by BAB is a system of privileges according to those with white skin. Importantly, Dyer says that it's not just epidermal markers of a vague otherness. This is not a direct quote. It's not just epidermal markers of a vague otherness, outward markings of difference came to stand in for a symbolic negation of whiteness. That is a moral, irrational, an intelligent, inhumane, and unchanging. And these constitute whiteness through the very absence of European designated spiritual or intellectual integrity. So according to Yancy, the intentional dehistoricization of whiteness veiled its composition as natural rather than as aspirational and subsequently reordered the ontological and epistemological ways of knowing morality, intellectualism, and rationalism. So by fundamentally devaluing indigenous knowledge that included spiritual modes of discovery and analysis, scientific rationalism decidedly positioned alternative ways of knowing as outside the very boundaries of rational thought itself. The schematics of this institution were self-sustaining if by a system that white ruling class has created, indigenous and black communities were naturally less intelligent, rational, and moral, then these same communities were always already precluded from disputing the very validity of racial science that legitimized equivocations of whiteness with prosperity. And these ideas are going to become really relevant as we move into understanding some of the results of the experiment that I am about to present. So my experimental research was presented to participants as a news story, and this is an example down here of how it was presented. There were different hosts or different news anchors, there were different images and representations, so as to reduce potential bias towards a single image. It was represented here as a news story and represented to participants as coming straight from the news, although later it was corrected to inform participants that indeed these stories represent kind of an amalgamation of different news stories about Syrian refugees or Palestinian refugees, but that they actually, this wasn't like a direct or an actual story that had happened. So my experiment was a three-level experiment. I used something called moral mappings, of which I'm not going to get too in-depth into, but this comes from something called moral foundations theory, which is predicated on the idea that there are a finite, essentially a finite amount of moral foundations or outlooks that influence the way that people see the world and the way that they interact with the world. So for example, I took these ideas and then I matched them with presidential rhetoric that occurred during the presidential election cycle. And so if a candidate talked a lot about police or talked a lot about the military, for example, that would reflect an idea of authority subversion and that was maybe would be used there. So then another manipulation set of manipulations are nationalities. So I manipulated whether people received a condition with a Palestinian story, a Syrian story, or a Norwegian story, and I also manipulated racial phenotype as well. So accompanying every story that the people received, they would receive two images, one with presidential rhetoric and one with a story about a refugee or immigrant family trying to resettle in the U.S. Every story would have one, either one image, either of a Syrian family with a lighter phenotype or with a darker phenotype. So the categories of hypotheses that I looked at pertain to rhetoric, nationality, and race as can be reflected in the experimental design. I measured participants' emotional reactions, their expectations, as well as their specific attitudes towards refugees and immigrants. I went through, I collected a lot of demographic data, and I ran this experiment. If anyone who's in quantitative studies is interested, I ran it as a single model with the three manipulations as well as the participants own religious affiliations. So for some of the demographic results, when I conducted this, I did allow people to select really like from 27 different religious variables. So for example, Jewish denominations were broken up into orthodox, conservative, or reformed Jewish. But by and large, almost everyone concentrated in these three categories, which I recoded to be kind of an atheist, agnostic, non-religious. There were very few participants in the Jewish denomination, but I thought it was important to keep that. And then also I had Christian denominations. Racially, it was again, like I said, predominantly made up of white participants. The education level, people were fairly highly educated who participated in this, but we also had a kind of a nice spread of people from different educational backgrounds. Also a fairly nice spread in terms of age, although once again I had mostly a younger, a set of younger people taking this. In terms of nationalism, I had again fairly high levels of people who held nationalist ideas participate in this study. And then for their political identities, it was about a two-to-one ratio of people who were Democrat taking this. And then quite a few people who didn't support any political parties, which I was a little surprised by, but maybe I shouldn't be quite as much given the current state of politics. So some of the results that I found, which these really are some of the results, because I want to note that I was examining quite a few things and I did find results for the moral manipulations as well as things more pertaining to the nationality of the refugees, but by and large the results that I found or the results that I'm presenting, which make up the core of the analysis, have to do with race and the religion of the people who took the experiment. So for kind of a breakdown, there were a lot of positive reactions when people received a darker phenotype representation such that they were more likely to believe that this refugee story was reliable or truthful. They were more likely to believe that the U.S. should welcome refugees and immigrants in general. They held significantly higher levels of feelings like feeling disturbed over U.S. policies demonizing refugees and immigrants. I almost reached a level of significance, but this is still an important finding that people who received darker phenotype representations were almost more likely to support the assertion that people have a right to flee their homes of origin. They were more likely to support refugee and immigrant resettlement. They felt sadder for the refugee families in the story and they also held significantly higher feelings of acceptance towards the refugee the refugee family. People who received the lighter phenotype representations were more likely to agree with a statement that white Muslims are less violent than brown Muslims because they are still culturally more similar to the West. They were less likely to receive the lighter phenotype versus the darker phenotype. They were less likely to agree with the statement that it would be foolish for Muslims to demand access to all levels of society, which once again the flip side of that is that people who received the darker phenotype were statistically more likely to believe that Muslims that it was foolish for them to demand equality to all aspects of society. Those who received the lighter phenotype also believed they could recognize a Muslim by their physical appearance alone and they were almost less likely to hold neoliberal expectations which are a set of expectations that have to do with public or like reliance on certain government support for refugees and immigrants. So right so even though I have more things to get through just as a summary what we can kind of see here for the racial for when people received the darker phenotype representation by and large they had more of an altruistic or a sympathetic response to the refugee family and towards immigrants and refugees in general. When they received the lighter phenotype representation people were more likely to display anti-Muslim racism attitudes and to kind of show more of a preference for lighter phenotype or have higher better more nicer if you will views towards lighter phenotype refugees and immigrants in terms of the religions effects. What I found was were mostly differences between Christians and the group that is agnostic or atheist or non-religious and so you know just for anyone again who runs statistics or is interested in the quantitative aspect of this they did run post hoc analyses to ensure that there were significant differences between those two groups and that it wasn't just something thrown off by there being a smaller group of the Jewish community participating in the survey. So this is mostly comparing the Christian groups and the non-religious groups so that means that Christians were less likely to believe that immigrants and refugees had a right to challenge U.S. policies. They were less likely to believe that immigrants and refugees should have input on their treatment. They were less likely to support resettlement in general and they were less likely to be disturbed over negative rhetoric about these communities. They are more likely to believe there should be higher legal standards for immigrants and refugees. They are more likely to support an English requirement prior to resettlement. They are more likely to hold anti-Muslim racist sentiment and they also were more likely to hold higher expectations that refugees and immigrants assimilate, have positive feelings or attitudes and for them to not rely on U.S. aid or resources. Christians were also believed that they could spot a Muslim by physical appearance alone and they also thought it was foolish for Muslims to have access to all levels of society. Additionally, participants who believe that whose faith was more important to them who believe the U.S. should welcome all faiths equally and who also believe that the U.S. is a unique safe haven for Christians and Jews overall had less positive views for immigrants and refugees, held higher expectations for immigrants and refugees and were less likely to report or to support resettlement. So we can kind of see even within this that people simultaneously believed that the U.S. does welcome all faiths equally but then at the same time also believes that the U.S. is a unique safe haven for Christians and Jews, right? And so we kind of see there being a wrench thrown into some of these these ideas or these worldviews. So then how do we explain these seemingly contradictory results where we have a situation where people seem to have a nicer or more positive view of lighter phenotype refugees and immigrants but also really would prefer to have darker phenotype refugees and immigrants be resettled? How do we kind of rationalize this idea that Christian communities are that in the U.S. historically a lot of Christian communities have been the ones who are leading the way to have refugees resettled or who find homes for refugees but then also you have a situation where they are the ones who have the least positive view between Jewish Christian and non-religious communities in the U.S. towards these groups. So we can kind of we can understand this best if we understand it through a lens of Arab American history, right? So until the 1960s Arab Americans were not considered European white but they also were not deemed as antithetical to whiteness itself nor did they threaten the ideological integrity of the U.S. racial system. Interviews that were done with Arab Americans in around the 1960s 1970s 1980s have shown that some Arab Americans actually thought they were perceived as a model minority. And the raceness that is the race put on these communities living in the U.S. really fluctuated over time depending on the needs of whiteness to discipline U.S. citizens and incoming immigrants. So Arab Americans avoided being wholly raced in the U.S. not because they were unidentifiable as in other indeed many Arab Americans were included in categories along with Ottoman Turks, Greeks, Italians, and other Mediterranean groups based on the context and at a time when these other groups were not yet subsumed into categories of whiteness. They were not yet raced because the history of Arab American immigration coincided with moments when they were permitted or sometimes demanded of to assimilate into normative cultural definitions of whiteness. Although this points to the very fluidity of the U.S. racial episteme itself, Arab Americans racial adaptability has been a product of their adjacency to whiteness whereby this community at times was able to legislate their own identities in a way that African or indigenous Americans for example could not. Despite whiteness's affordances to Arab American communities their subject position was always determined through white intermediaries rendering their racial identities both subjective and often very precarious for these communities. So the reason that Syrian and Palestinian Arabs in particular avoided rigorous racial identification until the 20th century derives from shifting immigration policies that aim to keep as many quote-unquote undesirable immigrants out of the United States as possible. And we can see this because if we're looking I pulled up this map to hopefully be a little bit of a help to us and so this is early Arab immigration to the U.S. and sorry moving my clicker out so you can see it. So early Lebanese Syrian and Palestinian immigrants to the U.S. were referred to by enlarge as Syrians. This was due to this whole area in many often being referred to as al-shams and U.S. citizens would just call them all Syrians because they didn't really understand the complexity of the region but within this area of al-shams we see like here is Syria here is Jordan there is Palestine sorry I'm trying to look in Lebanon I'm trying to see where it's listed I believe it's right here. So what happened was the inability for people to recognize some of the differences led them to just be altogether categories in the U.S. as Syrian for some time right the first large-scale immigration to the U.S. occurred between the 1880s and 1920s but it's important to note here that as Alexa Naf or Alexa Naf has demonstrated in her fantastic and really foundational work on Arab American communities as that individual Arabs had actually been traveling and immigrating to the U.S. or traveling back and forth between the U.S. and in their country of origin really for several hundreds of years for several hundred years before that. So around that time we had a number of immigration restrictions which I wish I could get into I don't have time to go for all of them but there was the naturalization act of 1790 the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in 1889 that's when the U.S. began using or a specifically as an additional immigration category to screen entrance into the U.S. there was the 1917 immigration act and then also the Johnson Reed Act of 1924 and then there were additional immigration acts after that to either consolidate previous immigration acts or to change them right so they so Arab Americans did not avoid the early stages of specifically racialized violence in the U.S. because white Americans were benevolent towards this group but instead because whiteness as an ideology benefited from categorizing Arabs as temporary citizens of whiteness for example Arab Americans have historically acted as a boundary line between whiteness and otherness often stemming from their unique identities. Arabs have historically been had a higher socio been part of a higher socioeconomic group they are predominantly middle-class or wealthy landowners and entrepreneurs religiously Arabs before World War II were 95 percent Christian actually and racially they were able to once again litigate their whiteness in courts so as becomes clear the confluence of racial religious and presumed cultural identities have resulted in a contemporary system whereby Arab whiteness veil systemic inequalities that this community faces prevents Arab access to resources designated for marginalized communities and renders Arabs as threatening because of their ability to assimilate so if Arabs mark the limitations of whiteness Asian communities have historically precipitated or precipitated the hardening of racial boundaries and we can see that through some of the cases on litigation that occurred in the earlier 1900s one of the first ones was for Costa George Najour he he had lived in the U.S. for a long time but because of an earlier earlier acts that said that Chinese Americans could not be naturalized and he was forced to litigate his whiteness and improve that he was quote-unquote not easy on it and then in another case in 1910 Tom Ellis also had to try to litigate his whiteness in court and it's important to remember that during this period judges would use a would fluctuate in what types of rationale they would use for why someone was or was not white whether it be the visual representation or it be scientific racism addition an addition to other categories and so for Tom Ellis he had to he was on the borderline and what allowed the judge to rule in his favor was that he spoke English which was an example of his literacy but also that he was Christian which therefore implied that he had good moral character and so what these with this demonstrates is there oftentimes that race is unstable over time but by and large that when Arabs were able to litigate their whiteness they did so at the expense and by the same logic that really held up white supremacy at the time also again this does not necessarily mean that they always benefited from this rather they were often perceived by the wider public not to not be white and there were also for example situations or cases where Arab Americans were lynched as well so they did not necessarily receive any sort of positive treatment just because they were able to quote unquote litigate their whiteness okay so Arabs really stood in the middle of these discussions on racial identification their national identities position them as belonging to the Asian continent but their phenotypic variation predominantly Christian identity is an economic fit with contemporary American capitalist values were in opposition to common stereotypes about Asian communities that Arabs were visibly recognized as non-indigenous or indigenous American or black but not commonly accepted as white led to various attempts to litigate their whiteness to claim as privileges as we talked about so uh Arab Americans also hold on let me here we go Arab Americans also relied on Christian faith practices to establish their whiteness in US legal proceedings and this reaffirms kind of the complex mutual dependency of national and ethnic origins and religious affiliation that historically constituted race as natural rather than a construct although explicit mention of race sorry if religion is often elided from conversations on race scholars in whiteness studies diligently unearth the role that religion symbolically and materially held in the violent disenfranchisement of racially marked marginalized communities in America scholars target the 1700s and 1800s as a period where codification of racial hierarchies in the US took hold so scholarship examines how the groundwork for race hierarchies has been in place for centuries that Christians brought a tradition of the binary of black and white moral dualism to bear on an enemy that could be perceived as black so the crusades were thus part according to dire of a heightening awareness of skin color differences which they further inflected in terms of moral attributes so what we see here is that over time and specifically in the United States Christianity had worked to uphold racial binaries between whiteness which was associated with ideas of purity morality holiness and these same values that were used to rationalize slave holding in the United States were similarly also used as a way to perpetuate taking over or the genocide of indigenous americans as well as us imperialism abroad so really in in the US Arab-Americans were perceived as white by and large until the quote-unquote question of Palestine in the 1960s when there were increasing wars between Israel and Palestinians and the other surrounding Arab countries and between the cold war when Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans became kind of the new bogeyman and in post-911 America we saw again kind of the ratification of the binary between or the perceived binary between Christian and Muslim communities in the US so for further information i'd recommend these books which are fantastic on Arab immigration Arab-Americans race and immigration in general so some of the takeaway results from this experiment are really that these results unveil a system of participant belief where by darker phenotype refugees are more recognizable as victims these experiment tests are not examining whether people feel sympathy overall but they're really based on the differences between when people received darker phenotype image or lighter phenotype image so we found that or i found that by and large those who are the participants in the study held more altruistic views towards darker phenotype refugees and this evidence really supports an explanation whereby the belief that lighter phenotype individuals possess inherent character traits that predisposes them to success and that failure to live up to the success is a personal rather than systemic condition for example i found that there were higher expectations that were placed on lighter phenotype or lighter phenotype Norwegians and darker phenotype Syrians so while there were higher expectations for darker phenotype Syrians higher expectations were placed on lighter phenotype Norwegians because of the supposed racial in-group out-group differences so here the US racial hierarchy really disciplines immigrants and refugees into perceived appropriate roles for these communities and traits like language racial phenotype or cultural presentation are used to mark certain communities as the other and therefore requiring additional surveillance so for white Christian citizens survival is then predicated on being able to essentialize the other and here essentializing the other reinforces sameness so without persisting categories or categorization of out-groups as possessing inherent similarities whiteness really risks the weakening of its ideology of supremacy through Middle Eastern and Muslim communities perpetually demonstrating cultural religious linguistic and political differences so even though there was more sympathy for darker phenotype refugees this is also potentially because they are markedly the other and therefore do not really disrupt systems or coherent systems of racial hierarchies so i'll go through the survey quite quickly here oh sorry okay so i took these experimental results then and i presented them to a participant pool of Syrian Americans in Palestinian Americans but before i did that i actually presented these groups with the exact same news story and i also presented them so with the news story and then a set of questions for the news story and then i presented them with the results from the experiment so i asked them a set of demographic questions we had about 46 participants which is a fairly small or fairly small pool of participants but we had a really a nice spread of people with different religious beliefs between non-religious atheists we had Sunni Muslim and then a variety of Christian denominations these communities were from all over the globe were born in different places they also held very national or ethnic identities some of the other results that i found is that these communities by and large felt really connected to their ethnic and or national communities that they spent a lot of time practicing or they spent most of their time relating to their community through practicing and artistic activity but they also connected to their communities through other religious activities or political and general social activities and that Palestinian and Syrian Americans use social media very often to represent themselves or represent their national or ethnic identities and that when they did so they were most likely to use facebook and then twitter so i had a pretty solid amount of people who identified this was a self-identification so people were able to enter in or select multiple racial identities as well as enter in other ones that they thought better represented themselves so they a lot represent or self-selected brown as a racial identity or white as a racial identity and because i had a smaller participant pool i then recoded these into even though these names are not quite like what i would like them to be and i had to recode them into people who identified as white only and then people who identified as multiple identities or in some way identified as white in addition to other racial or ethnic identities so i didn't find importantly when i used race as a mode of stratification to understand the results from the survey i didn't find any differences according to race in how people participated in activity is there was no difference in their connections to their identities or connections to others in the community there was no difference in how they identified in terms of their citizenship status whether it be immigrant asylum seeker or otherwise there also is no difference in terms of how people identified racially in how they identified religiously or whether they were born inside and outside the united states and this is important because these could be explanatory mechanisms for what i found because what i did find is that for participants who identified as white only they participated in fewer religious activities but they also held higher expectations for the immigrant and refugee family that was in the news story so they were more likely or they they held feelings that they expected the refugee and immigrants to be grateful to the united states for letting them in or that they should leave they also expected them to be happy and have feelings of happiness in general feelings of gratitude right and they were also less likely to agree with this statement that immigrants and refugees should have input regarding us policies and treatment of immigrants and refugees but at the same time when i presented the survey participants with the results from the experimental study which as a reminder was primarily it was native born u.s citizens who 87 percent of whom were white the participants who the survey participants who identified as white only and were more critical of immigrants and refugees and held higher expectations of them they rejected the experimental results or negative views on their communities at the same rate as people who didn't identify as white only so some of the takeaways from this are that we can understand or that to understand racial identity and social identity theory it really should be complicated by power structures and understanding that that social identities may actually fluctuate depending on who you on the information you receive or who is at a time per again or perhaps against your in-group right and i've also the takeaway would be that internalized whiteness may be an important lens with which to understand contemporary racial and social politics among marginalized communities so i think i have like 10 minutes five minutes does anyone know the vet do i still have a few minutes to go over the interview portion sorry i was muted yes um take take the time that you need oh okay great yeah okay so the last section oh the last section then um are the interviews uh and these interviews um were conducted with Syrian Palestinian artists six different artists over about 19 hours of talk time and i use something called grounded theory to assess these or to analyze these interviews and grounded theory in this case really centered the interviewees own experiences and and their demonstration of how their experiential reality itself is pedagogical and it's really useful and also breaking down some of the historical barriers between uh the academy and the quote-unquote real world if you will um so i use robin gg kelly's work to kind of guide that grounded theory and my research question um uh for this was how does it contemporary u.s news media ecology affects Syrian American and Palestinian American artistry so the artist um the first one is amel kassir she's pictured right here she's a Syrian American woman from Denver colorado um she's a poet a spoken word artist a teacher uh she's known for um her TED talk she's performed with the kennedy center she was also uh recently representative to the u.n international women's day on behalf of tortured Syrian women uh the next artist is basil el madani he is a Syrian American man from Kent Ohio he is a soul and funk musician as well as a logistics expert consultant manager um he really yeah all of these artists it's me i want to um comment on how they all had multiple jobs and need to have multiple jobs but they all had multiple jobs they spent a lot of their time on um and i was really grateful for them to take the time out to talk to me um so he's known for being the lead singer for basil in the super naturals um and they have performed at many a music venue including south by southwest um i also talked to tarah khalafoon he's a Palestinian American man from Detroit michigan he's a poet community organizer um and a data analyst he's known for he won a regional emmy award he's also advised on major um political campaigns in michigan and has been the face of a lot of active local activism in michigan uh so one of the other artists is dj fatin um she's a Palestinian American woman from brooklyn new york she is a dj an activist um and she's known for being the quote unquote female Palestinian dj a title or label which she kind of rejects but also appreciates for its sentiment um she's performed at the kennedy center she's been invited to perform embassies she's she's known globally um for her dj djing um the next person is seara he's the one who painted this mural he's a Palestinian American man from dearborn michigan in san francisco california he grew up between both communities so he identifies as coming from both um he's a visual artist who paints murals paintings digital art and clothing uh among other forms of art he's known for some of his commissioned art around san francisco the u.s even around the globe um and he's also known for his oakland palstein solidarity mural uh the last person that i interviewed was sammy obein he is my lebanese syrian palestinian italian interviewee from san francisco california yes he identifies very much with all four so we didn't limit you know um and he is with a comedian a host he does like 50 jobs amazing he's known for um he was one of the hosts on the netflix show the hundred humans um he's been on america's got talent conan the last comic standing and he's known for his performance of literally a thousand and one nights of comedy in a row i don't know how he kept that up so i talked to them a lot about their experiences um with uh producing art and and producing um important cultural products uh in light of or during um a time when the news media sphere news and media in general um produced not quite so kind or ideas or rhetoric about these communities and so tarix convert or tarix thoughts on this were really important and useful and so i wanted to read his thoughts um rather than kind of outlining um a whole theory of my own here so i think that's also what's been difficult about being palestinian about being a person of color often you know you're always asked well how bad is your oppression really it's like you can't point to one moment that was racist i'm like i'm always living under it it's like i'm always seen it i wake up every day knowing that my family back home has limited resources and limited access to health care has limited freedom right so like i wake up every day knowing this so when we talk about media portrayals there isn't one single media moment that i feel like impacts me they all weigh me down to a greater and greater extent with every passing moment and so long as we're not free it will always be weighed down whether i see it or not you know like whether i see it or not i know the perception i understand the way in which media has contributed or been complacent and complicit in the portrayal of my people so there isn't one moment there isn't like one time but i can say that it definitely frustrates me it definitely makes you want to it makes you feel like you're going crazy because like here you you can see tangible things that you believe and know are true and yet an entire population of people thinks that your truth is not real and so this was a sentiment that was expressed widely among the participants the idea that the the media and here most often referring to American media gaslit them and made them feel like what they were seeing what they were experiencing wasn't really what the reality was and so this was something that a lot of them worked through or that they were they were that was weighing down on them while they were presenting their work to me and while they are creating their their art every day so when i was looking at this as an entire body of interviews you know i worked with people from really varied backgrounds who were in different artistic mediums but really what struck me was that all of them enacted what i um termed preservation which is a form of collective memory so their work is adjacent to news mean to a news media landscape that both excludes Palestinian and Syrian self-representation it's important to note here that i in my work don't conflate Palestinian and Syrian identities or conflate Palestinian and Syrian experiences they are quite different however um there are not there are cultural similarities and there's also a lot of solidarity work between these communities um that um led me to um put these into a comparative analysis so their artist work enacts processes of preservation through collective memory building via social media and in-person platforms um through um a coherent body of work that is neither stagnant nor actively dissipating um there's the recognition of historical erasure they maintain critical identity constructs in diaspora and they use their geographical distance to build more protected infrastructures of representation in ways that some of the communities at um in in their the ethnic identities that they identify with um the ways that they might be unable to at certain times um this also extends post-memory literature into of future orientation so this is necessarily predicated on a group's experiential reality of an existential threat to their identity so such a threat motivates the art to act as both a carrier of aesthetic experience as well as a museum of historical reference um Basel talks about this when he um discusses uh videos of footage of ISIS and he said it's like the last thing that represents Syrian people is Daesh and yeah in fact like they they like these are the people who are working actively erase the memory of Syrian culture who are actively destroying well preserved ruins from the beginning of time to create their own dynasty and whatever and yet these are the people we're attaching Syrians people think of Syria this is one is one of the first things that comes to mind and so Basel really um critiqued the uh perpetuation um that um especially recently in the news that always rhetorically connects ISIS with Syrian communities um while um so they both kind of fetishize this connection while also hollow out Syrian historical and cultural identity that is very rich and very different from anything relating to ISIS um and Tarek said we're not fighting to just be free of occupation we're fighting we're fighting to amplify these beautiful components of the culture that do not get heard because of the occupation right like it's a different angle by which to take this it's not oh we want to stop being killed it's oh we want to live and um this idea was really um was at the forefront of what Tarek talked about because of the really common phrase that Palestinians like exist to resist and he brought up what happens we are no longer having to resist what happens when we then live in a in a place where we have some sort of self-determination we want to have a society where we can uh be able to bring our expertise or our you know education really to the forefront so the idea with these people is that um the artists are preserving traditional cultural values and practices within contemporary work that can be altered reimagined or imported into future communities so um this was also our conversations were often marked by references to 9-11 and how this had an effect on their own self-conception of their identities whether it was one of the artists recalled an incident where his teacher in the classroom um jokingly told him to not use an uzi to shoot up the classroom um but we also have like someone like sammy talking about how 9-11 really um it wasn't that he didn't know at all that he was arab-american before but it was after 9-11 that he began to understand what being arab-american meant within a u.s um within a u.s uh space so there i don't want to go too much longer here because i want to get questions um but i do i'll i'll briefly go over some of this um that there are uh i talk about three specific modes of preservation um from these interviews and they're having to do with form tradition and relationships and in terms of form a great example was dj fatin um she often performed for both within palestinian communities but also within the wider muslim communities in her area and she saw it as really a service to the community um because a lot of the um traditional celebrations like for weddings uh a lot of times there was a need for a woman to be able to play music or entertain at these cultural events and so she was able in in this in these instances to preserve some of the cultural tradition in terms of music or um the celebrations themselves but also start to bring in kind of more egalitarian views about women in the service industry so i talk about with this with other um artists like chris as well um there was a lot of talk about food and land chris made a comment that i just or si chasal i made a comment that i just love which is i may not have grown up speaking fluent arabic but we ate fluent arabic you know um and i'm reflected on this when she said that i'm you know she was talking about the differences between syrian and palestinian tabula for example um so uh food is often a really important um holder of memories that has an effect affective and also material um relationship between the people and and their um their uh their wider communities um si chasal or chris talked about how the mint from his grandmother's garden um allowed him for when he arrived in um israel his actually uh us neighbors who had who also had israeli citizenship picked um chris up from the airport and how when he looked down and saw mint that it reminded him of home it reminded him of his palestinian grandma's um that she the garden that she had kind of recreated in the u.s. um so i would love to go over this poem um i just want to i don't have time to read over it but this is almost food and land poem and it is incredibly powerful and moving i would really recommend i'm going and looking up my grandmother's farm and she talks about the role of food in um in persisting through the um the current uh the war in syria and i'm thinking about having to rebuild after the war and i just got rid of my video um so i also talk about textiles such as tetris the kafia for both syrians and palestinians as well as the importance of flags in their work um i talk about relationships um having to do with religion which was really important particularly for amel who um talked about the the way in which uh the war in syria really um reconstituted certain relationships having to do with faith among syrian communities um as well as for palestinians and the relationship between um palestinian and our christian and muslim palestinians um i also talked about intergenerational relationships and how this really comes into a lot of their work in preserving certain um certain traditions and understanding family structures but also trying to um also kind of that tension between uh first and second generation and third generation um immigrants in a in a different country trying to kind of hold on to um some of these traditions while also progressing in a certain way so i talked about um i'm only going to briefly go over this um race and preservation um through instances of solidarity this was really important for a lot of the artists um because uh they've been called racial slurs but many of them also grew up um among other um communities of color uh where they felt like they belong much more so than in in the in white communities and so they were um they grew up with these solidarity solidarities with them um but also uh all of them spoke to the importance of having of um uh carry not solidarity work um as part of their work with their own community so in conclusion um some of the the summary is that whiteness is an ideology and contemporary US Christian rhetoric uphold racial hierarchy in the US as pertains to Arab immigrants and refugees um there uh is seemingly internalized whiteness among Arab Americans and identifying with whiteness as an ideology rather than a phenotype um is highly correlated with negative views towards incoming Arab refugees and immigrants um I also found that Arab content creators are aware of media messages their effects and they take steps to preserve their historical traditions while also anticipating a complex and generative future in which this idea of um being able to quote unquote practice and being able to um uh have a very thorough knowledge of their relationship to tradition uh will allow um the the carrying on of those within the more egalitarian space in the future and I have several other projects underway um right now that look at interventions and devices and stereotypes and I think most importantly and going back and connecting this to the beginning is that they also look at um I'm starting a project that looks on how immigration policies in like in particular um can have uh impacts on um Arabs and and Iranians for example um so I'm not going to go over anything else I am just going to stop here so I'm going to go this way okay thank you have I unshared my screen thank you no uh okay let me stop share there we go great thank you Laura um I I have a bunch of questions and I'm just going to ask one to start things off and and then let others jump in um and that was uh it it relates to the the final section of your presentation just now about the various different artists that you interviewed and um so the way that you um described their work um in in one of the slides was that it existed adjacent to the kinds of um media representations negative media representations um that um your your more quantitative work uh addresses um and and you talked about the um those artists seeing or you spoke about the artist's work in terms of preservation and and I'm just wondering whether in your interviews with the artists whether um whether they characterize their their work as as uh challenges to um the like broad media stereotypes of of um Arabs and Muslims um in which case the audience would be uh a broad audience as well right sort of like engaging with those stereotypes on the larger realm of popular culture and media um versus um working to the the the kind of preservation work that you're describing um in some ways implies a kind of um an audience of others within the same or connected communities and kind of building a certain kind of strength from below right as opposed to using their media work you know cultural and media work as a a way of of combating stereotypes on this larger stage so yeah I'm wondering about those two kind of modes of media politics or cultural politics and and how they're articulated by the artists you spoke to great thank you that's a yeah a really important question and um it actually so first to address whether or not they themselves addressed media stereotypes or who their audience was I think it's is really what we're getting at here and it was split down the middle for the most part um I will say that really particularly Palestinian Americans were not speaking to a different outside audience they were not trying to combat certain stereotypes for the most part those Palestinian Americans were instead um really kind of more focused within their own community but with the hope and with the um additional the the goal would be that other communities could you know view their work witness their work see their work and then have some sort of way to kind of have access to this conversation whereas really the Syrian American artists that I spoke with were much more kind of outward looking in in terms of who their audience was so they mostly were trying to either represent Syrian Americans, Syrians in general, to audiences that were not of their own communities so they were speaking to their communities they were speaking in solidarity but by and large they were trying to kind of enact a type of educational experience for uh for people in the U.S. or globally and um so that is part of the first question and I'm trying to remember so that then part of that also gets into being adjacent to the media and I think that that's and I use that very carefully because oftentimes there is the kind of over determination of the word resistance and I think we often like to attribute um that everything that communities who have been marginalized or oppressed in some way and that everything they do is resistance but I think to some extent that also then serves to recenter um those narratives that are harming their communities and so they exist in the space where they acknowledge that these occur they know it it's weighing down on them but I think that for the most part they are trying to create um objects are trying to speak in such a way that they can show unity with their people that they can um whether showing them something beautiful or whether it be showing them something that they can relate to when they're walking down the street um that those communities are um that they're they're just trying to connect with them they're not necessarily trying to combat a specific media stereotype was there can you remember there another no you covered everything that I asked about that's great thank you um so there uh why don't we see there are a couple of questions that have come up in the q and a but also I wanted to just see if anyone immediately has a question Emily yeah thank you and Laura thanks very much for the wonderful presentation very comprehensive um so I had a question about your earlier quantitative media effects research you were talking about how um participants who identified as white only often held the assumption or the belief that um immigrants and refugee communities needed to um kind of act happy or uh kind of present gratitude for being in the us or else they should leave um and that reminded me of uh in econ the lump of labor fallacy which um is that like immigrants coming in only really take up jobs and don't also create demand for jobs um so I was wondering whether you've seen in your own research or other research um whether being presented with information about how immigrants contribute in various ways to communities of the economy whether like by you know accelerating innovation or paying taxes or taking jobs that um citizens often don't want to take uh it sort of attenuates those feelings that they need to be grateful or act happy just sort of thoughts about that yeah thank you Emily that's a fantastic question I I kind of work along that line of research and in other things that I do as well and um I I did measure in term um so so what you're talking about um is something that I sometimes deem respectability politics which when it comes to refugees and immigrants can mean that um there has to be a narrative that these communities contribute most often fiscally to a United States economy in order to be um worth it or or to be uh deserving of of being able to come into the United States and so you walk this really tight rope between acknowledging that you're that really Arab American Arab communities and Iranian communities in the United States actually do um they are known for their entrepreneurial um capabilities they have been to be on a some more of the middle class to even upper class in terms of immigrants in general and um they're highly educated we see a lot of um Arab Americans um also becoming physicians so they do occupy this place but on the flip side of that that same rhetoric then can also serve to limit who is allowed to come into the United States and that's what we've also seen with this new part public charge rule and with subsequent um quotas put on um on on immigrant communities that really limit how many communities can just be able to be accepted into the United States for just being a refugee and so um there there is the extent to which um like humans of New York Hone has you know ran a great series on Syrian refugees few years ago and so things like that do have the capability to somewhat humanize or or um bring positive information about a group to the wider public but then you also have situations where um I had or I completed a study on all of the uh news reports about um the executive order that I talked about in the beginning that prevented um Muslim or communities from Muslim majority countries from entering into the United States and I found that most of those stories for the exceptions or people that really should be let in that are typically focused on the military or focused on um uh people who were um families that were split up and so what really happened were communities who well they're escaping war they're they're fleeing violence um that that wasn't deemed as a important enough exception to to um be granted asylum for example or be granted an exception so that is something that's been studied a lot and and it it's really hard to find the balance of using that type of information to humanize and really broaden knowledge about these communities but also not reinforce something that is harmful to these communities in the first place which is this idea of respectability so I did that answer your question yeah thank you very much um on bar hi Laura thank you so much uh I have a good light in the last part you talk about intergenerational relationships and I was wondering how do you think like media narratives can generate uh despite this in these relationships if you think they can how they can um you mean how they can kind of complicate the intergenerational relationship yeah so interestingly I think I had it on my slide I didn't get to it but almost every person referenced Rami the show Rami which um he uh you know he he's one now right a golden a golden globe or an Emmy for the show it's a very it's a widely popular show and it's it's about um um a man who's Egyptian-American and he kind of has to deal with balancing all of the this like intergenerational expectations um and understanding what it really means to be Egyptian-American in the United States at this particular time um and kind of caring all the to some extent the burden of what the family expects of him and cultural and traditional values while also trying to um fit in or be part of uh US society so I think um what I've seen and I I don't know if I can speak to shows as a whole but I'll use this as an example that I've seen um a lot of Arab-Americans really relate to it and I think it's um it's something that there there have been criticisms on it that maybe that Rami doesn't always present a really complicated narrative about women um and I think that he did a better job with that in the second season but what I've seen by and large is that people feel like they're being seen or feel like this idea of being in this liminal space of caught between two cultures where they are feeling pulls from different generations that is something that they can relate to and also it almost gives them like not just a language to use when speaking to friends but it's almost something like they see it and then they can talk to a friend and they're like oh you saw that like oh yeah that happens all the time and I think we see that a lot too increasingly with like YouTube videos that there's a lot of um you know for second third generation immigrants creating YouTube channels and being like in kind of showing this tension and so I think that it can be really productive um for um for second third generation immigrants or refugees or asylum seekers who um maybe realize that other people have these experiences but I think that there's a lot of attention around and I think even the portrayal of it is that it's not it doesn't always have to be frustrating either that at certain points it can be kind of funny or it can create really um uh beautiful moments between generations where they they can have a space to come together so um I think I mean I love Rami I think that other shows that are are um similar um like even Jane the Virgin is a really nice example too um that they can be really useful and helpful for people to have conversations on topics where they might not know where to start otherwise. I'm gonna take a couple of the questions that have coming um on chat and in our Q&A um and uh the first was um earlier on Susanna who's one of our alum um asks uh what is the concept of a unique safe haven for Christians and or Jews in a discourse with American Christians me uh she says that confused me Christianity is the world's predominant religion right is there some implication that Christians are persecuted globally? The answer is yes there is the perception among American Christians and specifically evangelical Christians that Christians are persecuted globally um and this has been something that has really I would say has really um intensified since perhaps the 1980s um and the increasing rise of some of the like for example um Liberty University, Jerry Fowell Jr um uh in in the last um presidential election we saw that Christians were quite upset that um President Obama uh brought in Syrian Muslims and they just couldn't understand why he would be bringing in Syrian Muslims to the United States who are refugees because they're like oh well ISIS is is also Muslim right and and so without understanding some of these really complicated nuances um and and showing up and wondering why there wasn't a preference for Syrian Christians to be resettled over Syrian Muslims so um there there is this notion that Christians are persecuted globally that they are increasingly being persecuted and targeted in the United States we've seen this also with the idea of the war on Christmas um for example and so a lot of evangelical um Christian commentary or rhetoric does uh kind of construct us as a safe haven as some sort of unique place which really does also kind of harken back to earlier Christian communities whether the 1900s 1800s that viewed the U.S. as a new Israel to Christians and for this community and so this unique safe haven for Christians and Jews also comes out of um a lot of my findings that have shown that Christians really believe that they are much more similar and related to um and hold the same values as um American Jews for example then they do um American Muslims and so um for many American Christians there has been this kind of division where they see it even they call it um Judeo-Christian belief systems um and and that Muslims do not fit into that narrative and so measuring that was more so a measure of um kind of this this rhetoric that situate has a situation where Christians are perceived to be um globally persecuted more than other face at the moment or that they're being um increasingly persecuted and that in the U.S. there's a risk of losing uh personal freedoms so that's really where that came out of um kind of this idea of isolationism uh nationalism um but also some of these these um binaries between Christians and other religious communities so I don't know if that answers the question Susanna um that's a that's a great question and definitely needs explanation so okay great um so uh I'll take another uh question from this is from Q&A from from our uh attendees and this is from Kimia Jalalipur and the question is could you expand on why you think the internalization of white ideology may occur among Arab Americans or other marginalized communities yeah thank you Kimia for that question um that is a great question um in my mind the internalization of whiteness does come from uh what we've seen originated with delegation of whiteness in the earlier 1900s and this pressure to um either assimilate or adopt certain practices that align with whiteness so as to avoid um marginalization and so over time the weight of avoiding marginal or trying to avoid certain instances of marginalization has in some cases resulted with that that internalization of whiteness as an ideology in order to potentially avoid experiencing negative consequences that other marginalized communities may experience or really that they've been so socialized into this white ideology that it's something that is part of their their worldview or part of who they are just as a person growing up in the u.s so i think there may be a number of reasons for this and i think that would have to be something that would be studied with a much much larger um participant pool as well great thank you um uh there are there are a couple more q&a questions but i thought i would bring it back to um see if there are any questions from our graduate students is it possible let me just um throw up oh you can't see my they unshared it um if anyone is interested in asking me some of those questions uh you can always email me them at allpartainitmit.edu sorry go ahead my apologies for that for interrupting no no problems um uh so i'm i'll go to another q&a question um and that is from Hamid Reza Nasiri um and uh who writes there is this issue of looking at refugees by either being kind to them or rejecting them while the root cause of having of of having been refugees is ignored so when we have syrian or honduran refugees there is that binary perspective but little conversation on the significant impact of us interventions in those places in causing mass migrations the 2009 coup in honduras um or the role of the us inciting war in syria are not discussed so the question is i'm curious if you ask your interviewees not just about their sympathy or openness um but about their responsibility toward refugees for the wrong doings of their own government and then i think he follows it up with to clear if i'm asking about the surveys from you as citizens especially but also maybe how the artists think about that issue thank you um hamid reza thank you so much for that um that is a such an important um question that really uh gets at the heart of a lot of what what i do which is trying to um be able to bring to light not only some of the underlying colonialist or imperialist policies uh that further demonize these communities um and also um but they also in many ways contribute to the displacement in the first place so i think that is something that um very much needs to be looked into in in this current work i did not look into that but i think that is actually a really fantastic way to go forward in a different direction would be to get some of these um would be to get reactions from participants if it's reframed instead of something that these communities are fleeing from you know you know usually the um the uh event or the the instance from which they are fleeing is often uh you know it's it's unrooted or unmoored from its origin right and so it just happens that's what oftentimes these like events are are just seem to happen or just happens over there because of their history or their identities and so i think that um it would be really interesting to bring that to participants to um maybe instead frame it to them as their accountability and being and being part of a democracy that has democratically elected representatives who do have some influence over um us policies abroad so um i didn't ask them about that i um the artists that i talked with um we did have many conversations and understanding the uh political relationships between the us and um different governments around the world so so that is something that we talked about quite a bit but um i really love this question i um gosh i need to conduct another experiment with this question so thank you so much okay um and yeah i'm gonna go back to our group online here to see if there are any other questions and there's one more in the q&a that i can get to as well okay okay i'm gonna go back over to the the q&a and laura you can probably you see this too right so the question is does the editorial position slash makeup of the u.s media matter in other words do you um oh do you i guess do you show the same story presented by aljazeera fox news and msnbc oh do you think it must be there's a missing word but um would generate differing results have shown to the same control audience okay that is a great question thank you jonathan um the first question seems a little bit different from the rest of it you know i i think they are related um i do think that the editorial position or i do think that the um that it matters who is presenting these stories i think that even what i found with my survey participants is the criticism that by and large um conversations on their communities did not come from the communities themselves they were not rooted in in the historical demands or goals of the communities themselves so i think that um the representation and um in all levels of media and media production is absolutely um necessary relevant and does have an effect on the types of stories that are being put out um in terms of do i think the same i think you're asking if i think the same story presented on different news stations would generate different results and the answer is yes i do um which is why i used the same i used i believe a a b c i think um for that um i didn't use fox news or msnbc on purpose i didn't use el jazeera on purpose um because very much what we can see with um with uh politics right now in this country is that polarization doesn't only just occur from what's being said but really from the source that's saying it and um so i think that right now with ideas of fake news or legitimacy that it was important for me to keep the news um station the same because um in that experiment i didn't manipulate the news station so in the future that would definitely be something and i'm sure that other people have manipulated news stations and other experiments and my experiment would have gotten too big but yeah the answer is yes i i think that's a great great point and it would affect i think um participants views all right well we've gone over time but um uh okay i'm just waiting to see if any any other questions are there i have more questions but we'll have to do that offline at some point so um thank you so much um that was really a wonderful talk and um and we um look forward to hearing within our own community here hearing more about your work and and um uh thank you so much thanks go back thank you to everyone uh who's here today okay all right take care everyone thank you