 I'm Tom Ivaco with the state and urban policy as better known as close-up one of the research centers here in the Ford My pleasure to introduce today's speaker I'm going to start with a few notes about the format of our event We have time at the end for questions So please write your questions on the index cards that have been handed out if you need another one Just flag a staff member down Bonnie in the back here. We'll be keeping an eye out We'll collect those starting at about 430 or so And for those of us joining online through the live web stream Please tweet your questions using using the hashtag policy talks. We'll transcribe those questions on to the cards here ourselves Joining us to present the questions are a few of our students first is Kristen Richardson Joined by Lily Alexander They will ask the questions to our speaker today and they'll be assisted by another University of Michigan student Michael Wolf Who will be assisted by Sarah Mills our? Senior project manager at the Center for local state and urban policy Sarah has been leading an effort on campus to bring together faculty staff and students from across the campus to Look at issues across the urban rural divide But they're taking a particular approach which is a little bit different looking at these more along a spectrum As opposed to conceiving of them as across a divide So we'll close our event today with a couple of notes about a following event And finally I'd like to thank Bonnie Roberts Our events manager for pulling this all together for us today is always a great job. Thank you Bonnie So today's talk is about listening to strengthen democracy. It's co-sponsored by close-up and the forward school As part of the school's initiative on conversations across difference. I think we all Can feel the strain that our country is under today with hyper partisanship and tribalism really plaguing our politics and In many ways defining a lot of our biggest social challenges in this Difficult time the forward school is committed to Playing a leading role in rebuilding a public discourse that is non-partisan evidence-based and inclusive We host public events That model reasoned and evidence-based debate and that explore issues around identity and difference We develop new student programming a curriculum to train our students and how to bridge difference Productively discuss contested topics and negotiate We practice trust building through a problem-solving and procedural innovations that test and evaluate new methods for learning listening and solving problems across difference and We foster a generous sense of community with our students in the classroom and Among our broader community overall the Ford school has a deep mission-driven commitment to the values of scholarship respectful dialogue and inclusive community our graduate and undergraduate students are training to be civic and national leaders and we aim to help them develop the ability as well as the broader public to make progress on difficult problems through constructive dialogue and action across divides And so today's talk by Kathy Kramer is a perfect fit for these efforts We're proud to note that Kathy earned her PhD in political science from Michigan She is the Natalie C. Holton chair of letters and science and Professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin Madison She's also a senior advisor at cortico non-profit that works with MIT's laboratory for social machines to foster constructive public discourse Among the public but also among the media to help us develop a better understanding of one another and She'll talk about some of this work today Kathy's work focuses on the way that People in the United States make sense of our politics and of their place in it she's an award-winning author and is known for an innovative approach to the study of public opinion in which she introduces herself into Conversations of groups of people to listen and get a better understanding of how they make sense of public issues She's the author of an outstanding recent book the politics of resentment which makes use of this kind of unconventional approach and Which helps make sense of some of the most important cleavages that are dividing the country today So rather than take any more time from Kathy's talk. You can read more of her Really impressive bio in your program or on our website if you're online And meanwhile, please join me in welcoming Kathy Kramer Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for having me Bonnie Roberts. Thank you so much for all the logistics I She's sort of an amazing person if you don't know Bonnie and you need the organization in your life I would say talk to her. Yeah, I've only been here a few hours, but I've had a fabulous visit So thank you so much and thank you Tom and Sarah. Thank you and yes I am a very proud graduate of the political science department here at Michigan And I just want to give a shout out to Don kinder whom I see in the room a dear friend who Very early on taught me the value of studying the things that you care most about in the world And you'll see in short order. I'm going to tell a series of stories You'll see in short order that I was very fortunate to Study political science here because it wasn't an environment in which I learned all of the cutting-edge skills and I also learned the value of Pursuing ideas that I cared about and that were important in the world and the methods by which I did that were less important than studying important things and I owe a lot of that Just the courage to do that to Don who Supported me from very early on so let me tell you some stories. I When I was a college graduate student here I was fortunate to get involved with Kent Jennings who was a professor here at the time and just recently retired from the University of California Santa Barbara and Kent across the course of his career had been engaging in this study that is Generally known as a study of political socialization in 1997 when I was a graduate student I was involved with that project and it was the fourth wave of this study Which was a study of people who were high school seniors in 1965 and then they were followed over the course of their life And part of my job was to interview some of these folks in rural areas of the Deep South and so I was doing Basically a caddy survey so a laptop based survey in people's homes and asking them questions like this This is one of the more famous Michigan questions about partisan identity very straightforward You know generally do you consider yourself a Democrat Republican or what? Sorry that Republican Democrat independent or what and then people would tell us and we'd record the answers and in our Laptops and at the time a lot of the work was done on paper So you had to fill out some paperwork and send it back to the Institute for social research here There are the survey research center and I was spending a lot of time in post offices. So places like this Mailing these things back and in rural communities of the Deep South as in many smaller communities across the country Post offices are a really important hub of the community because most people have post office boxes and they stop in About once a day, maybe it's changed over time as surface males become less a part of our lives But people stop in and get the news and move on and I was really interested in the conversations I was encountering in those places as well as the conversations I was having with these survey respondents after the survey was over and so from pretty early on in my life as a political Scientist, I knew I was interested in conversation And I knew that I picked up a lot about their lives and about the way they understood politics from listening to them Talk with one another and so again I owe a lot of credit to this university for saying yes, that's an interesting thing And yes, we support you in studying it in whatever way you think is useful So fast forward a bit across the course of my career this is basically the question I've been pursuing is how do people understand their world and What's behind this is this recognition by many of us that you can expose people Two different people to the same message the same speech the same campaign ad and they will come away with two different readings on it Two different interpretations. They'll see different things hear different things. What is that? How does that happen? It happens because we all have different lenses through which we see the world and through which we filter things and Process them. I have found it just in different ways I've been pursuing this question and I found it much more rewarding than This question watch which is basically how can people be so stupid? How can people vote against their interests? What is wrong with them, right? Instead I like to ask not what are people getting wrong, but how are they getting it? Which leads me to 2007 I had just earned tenure at the University of Wisconsin and I told myself Okay, now you can do the study you always want to do which is drive around the state that you love Wisconsin invite yourself into conversations and Listen to try to understand the way Social class identities matter for the way people are making sense of politics So this is Wisconsin just a brief background here The blue areas are more urban areas in the state and you'll see just very quickly It's a pretty rural state roughly half the population lives in what most Assessments of ruralness would consider to be a rural or a small community What I did I was interested in social class identity. So I told myself I'm going to sample a bunch of communities across the state that vary in terms of socioeconomic background and then I'm going to invite myself into conversations in each of those places Assuming that the conversations I come across will vary in the social class background of the participants So these are the places that I sampled and what I did Was to ask people in the know I'd say in such-and-such Wisconsin Where can I go where people regularly hang out that I might get access to and then invite myself in so I went to a lot Of places like this. This is a diner. I went to a lot of gas stations Typically these were places that where people were meeting in the morning before work or they were retirees And it's a way to get out of the house in the morning. I'd walk in invite myself into the conversation by saying hi I'm Kathy from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Do you mind if I join you this morning? And they would look at me like I was slightly You know odd which I am And they'd say sure and then invite me in and I would visit with them I'd asked them some very open-ended questions and generally just try to listen and watch how the flow of the conversation went and then I go back the next year and a year after that and Basically that that project in about a year turned from being a project about social class per se to a project about what I was hearing or understood to be a rural versus urban divide because I had sampled many different kinds of communities across the state and and Because of that ended up spending a lot of time in smaller places rural communities And I was really surprised by what I heard in those places So what I heard became this book which I'm going to briefly explain to you now And then I'm going to tell you stories about where that has led me since 2016 So what I heard I call rural consciousness Which is this sense of a strong identity is we're people from a smaller town Where we're rural folks very rarely did people say anything like that? They'd say things like people around here people in places like this or you all down there in Madison Things like that and so was this identity sense of we're a certain kind of people and We are on the short end of the stick time and time again in three main ways in lots of ways But I kind of categorize them into these three one is you know all the decisions that affect our lives are made down there in Madison or in Milwaukee, which are the two metro areas in the state the only two and They're communicated out to us. We don't people don't come out here and ask us what we think We're told what the rules are going to be So we we're on the short end of the stick in terms of power basically in terms of political power and decision-making power We're also on the short end of the stick in terms of resources because you know all of our taxpayer dollars get sucked in They would say spent on Madison or Milwaukee and we don't see that money in return and The third way is we are also on the short end of the stick in terms of respect because you all Making the decisions down there. You don't know us. You don't know what life is like in a place like this You don't like us and you don't respect us You think we're racist and sexist and homophobic and Islamophobic and again They wouldn't use those words, but it came out in in different phrases So that's so bringing in of itself. I think it's important in of itself, but as a political scientist it seemed to me Politically really important. This is a set of sentiments that a savvy Politician might tap into right in the following ways So I call it resentment Because it has these many different layers to it. You might have heard some of them already just in the way I'm explaining it So it's resentment towards cities and city people, but it's also resentment towards elites Right, and it's also resentment towards one political party more than another perhaps increasingly so since the time I was in the field early 2007 And it's also racism or resentment against racial and ethnic minorities Wisconsin you may be familiar with this is very Segregated racially and so when people are talking about the cities Oftentimes it's also conversation about race So these many different layers mean a Politician can ignite or make salient one part of this and activate the other components of it So it's potentially really powerful So it sets the stage for divisive messages to clearly carve out for people who's the us and who's the them right because People are we're telling me in many different ways. Look, we are working really hard to make ends meet We are good hard-working Americans and it seems to us that our hard-earned Money is going to support people who aren't as deserving aren't as hard-working Whether it be you Kathy, you're a full-time professor down at University of Wisconsin Madison What are you doing driving around the state having coffee with us? Right, how was that hard work right or sometimes they'd say to me when do you take a shower and? I'd say well before I go to work exactly they would say I Work so hard that the first thing I do when I get home is take a shower and They would just have this sense like there's hard workers and then there's you always sit behind desks, right? And it seemed to them that a lot of their money was going to pay for People like me and that's just one example because sometimes the deserving this was Racialized right they'd have in their heads the stereotype of a welfare recipient someone who didn't deserve the public benefits that they were receiving Another way in which this was very ripe ground for a politician to tap into is that it sets the stage for someone to say Yeah, let's have less government because people would look around at their communities and say Whatever government is doing it is not working for us. It's not working for people in places like us. It's not working for people like us and there's a sense that Government folks were people who didn't respect people in the smaller communities There's a sense that government in general was an urban thing So even for public employees living right there in the community for example public school educators People would sometimes say things like look, you know, yeah, I know he's lived in the community for the last 25 years but you know that all the the testing the Decisions about curriculum all that stuff decided by you all down in Madison not by people here And whether or not that's true There was this perception that public employees the way they do their jobs were driven by urban values and urban decisions So lo and behold 2010 rolls around and Scott Walker comes on the scene now mind you he had been on the scene in Wisconsin for some time He was Milwaukee County executive and he ran for governor and won And shortly after he took office He proposed this piece of legislation called act 10 popularly known as act 10 in Wisconsin Which was a kind of a budget addendum and it was a budget repair bill that included this provision to basically Undercut public employee unions. It made it very difficult for public employee unions to to to organize and Bargain and also it required public employees to pay in more of their paychecks for pensions and health care benefits This picture is a reaction in Madison how people rallied around the state capital in Madison It seemed to be the most unpopular piece of legislation ever proposed in the state but 20 25 miles outside of the city the conversation the behavior was very different Instead people were saying things not like let's you know impeach the guy, but it is about time It's about time someone came to came along and made those people pay in more more to the pot so That was all very sobering for those of us in Wisconsin and those of everybody watching from other parts of the country and then the 2016 presidential election took place, right and people started wondering Wow What is going on in rural Wisconsin? Those of you watching returns on election night 2016, right is the lines on the New York Times chart cross and you realize Donald Trump would be our next president and Wisconsin was you know in the middle of the night with the last state To clinch the election for Trump and it seemed pretty quickly that what whatever was happening Wisconsin had some parallels to other parts of the country as well and Donald Trump is a very different politician than Scott Walker, but in his own way was saying to people you are right to be so upset you are Doing things as you should you are hard-working you are a good American and What you deserve is going to other people or those people and for Scott Walker The target of blame was basically public employees That wasn't necessarily Donald Trump's target of blame instead He was pointing the finger at immigrants and Muslims and uppity women and liberal elites and such But in their own ways they were kind of playing into the same Set of sentiments now I don't want to convey that it was rural Wisconsin nights or rural Wisconsin or rural Americans who were the the kind of Pivotal population group in the election of 2016, but they were important to the outcome of that election and My goodness, they've received a lot of attention since then right One thing that happened to me just personally I thought I was studying a corner of the world that I cared a lot about and election that election changed my life pretty much overnight in terms of who was asking me to share my knowledge and Asking me to commentate on the world around me including one of my one of my favorite stories is as My I sort of as returns are coming in the election night of 2016 I turned to my daughter who's now 12 and I said I think we should go home I think I'm going to be busy tomorrow and I'm checking my email before we went to bed and there's an email from the New York Times saying Hi, we're the New York Times. We think we missed something. Can we talk to you tomorrow? And so that that was just the start of sort of a lot of people saying what the heck is going on in Wisconsin and What can you help us understand about rural America? Part of what happened was many people around the country and around the world, but primarily from the United States wrote messages to me primarily by email saying sometimes asking questions, but more often than not just Expressing things to me sort of they had heard me speak or read something that I wrote and Felt compelled to tell me what was on their minds and I'm turning to those messages next to help Convey I think the importance of perspective so what I learned from doing this work is that listening taking the Having the luxury of taking the time to going to people and sitting down with them and listening to the way they talked about politics Opened my eyes to all kinds of things that I hadn't even thought. I Hadn't been looking for so one thing in particular You know the the way in which people were turning to me and say can you help me explain? Just taught me that we really don't know much about the perspectives that people are using to think about politics In rural America, but in many different parts of our society It's not just rural Americans who are feeling as though they're unheard and not Seen or they're overlooked or disrespected I mean many people in different components of our society Express those same sentiments and it is true that as social scientists or just as political observers We often are asking this question. So how can people think that we want there's part of us It wants to know more. How are they understanding the world? It helps to listen to people talk to people in their own lives to get a better sense of that it also taught me that There's more to know about political leaning people's political leanings obviously than their partisanship because oftentimes I would ask people So tell me which party bet best represents the interests of people around here and Almost always without skipping a beat people would say well neither party like none none of them are paying attention to us and and their their attachment to the parties was Much more complicated than a leaning towards Republican or Democrat, but it was intertwined with this sense of weariness of the parties that I It helped to listen to the way they talked about the parties to understand that and finally I just want to note that One thing I think these conversations did for me was to see the complexity of the way When people are talking about those people and who's deserving that the way economics and Racism or cultural anxiety, whatever we want to call it are intertwined in the way people are perceiving candidates and policy So I'm turning now to these letters to dive into why listening is valuable a bit more I'm going to share with you some of the Words that I received. I think these are all from email from people who were Reading stuff. I wrote or hearing things that I wrote and responding basically to the people I had been studying So primarily people who we assume Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. They said say things like You know, I don't know what they're paying attention to but this seems to be from another universe Or they'd say things like don't they get that they're getting government support too that they're getting government benefits themselves And how is it that they want to undercut government and why why Scott Walker? Why smaller government? Or sometimes they'd say things like You know They they have the opportunity to move they can move to where the jobs are basically the people in those communities Are the people who've been left behind and they're just kind of wallowing in their own resentment? harsh, right What's really harsh though and really troubling to me is all that stuff sounds so much like the comments that I heard Trump supporters saying about Whom they presumed to be Clinton supporters, so I want to share those with you now. Sorry to make you even more depressed For example, I hear oftentimes that the Democrats they just cannot decide for themselves Like they are just being fooled hoodwinked whatever you want to call it like this one guy is saying, you know This this one Democrat he said basically even if Hitler ran for president He would vote for him just because he's Democrat like they cannot make their own choices Or here's another set of things like they would say things like You know Not just voting on the basis of partisan identity But they just vote for Barack Obama because they're black or they just vote for Hillary Clinton because she's a woman, right? Or they'd say things like You know the only reason people vote for Democrats is that they're on some kind of government program And they just want the money to continue flowing or they'd say They're hypocritical and oftentimes this would come up around when I'd go back after the 2016 campaign to some of these groups and say Well, it would come up Be in the way it hadn't before the campaign Who did I vote for and I would say Hillary Clinton and they would say why and I'd say well, you know I saw that videotape access Hollywood. I have a daughter and they say yeah, yeah, yeah But Bill Clinton how is that any different than what Donald Trump had been doing? They're hypocritical, you know They they criticize Trump for behaviors that they don't criticize in their own people Another thing that would come up is just the level like a perception of Democrats being intolerant So this person's talking about how you know, you try to have a conversation with them Doesn't matter what you say like you just you're just totally wrong. They won't listen to you Right, so, okay now that I've thoroughly Depressed you what's so troubling to me about this is there's all this energy being spent on What is wrong with each other what needs to be fixed in those people right on the floor? We're focusing on the flaws of each other as opposed to Focusing up maybe on the things that are more fundamentally wrong, which is like why is it that? our attention is drawn to What's wrong with each other? Why is that the conversation and? What what happens is that? We get so frustrated with one another right and we think That the problem is those people and clearly they are not paying attention to the right news or any Information you give them will not change their mind and so it's hopeless and so we throw up our hands We turn away. We don't engage. We don't get involved and the result is that the policies that are getting us to these places Whether we're talking about economic policy or otherwise continue and so the people in power Have the ability to continue passing legislation that actually isn't helping the people who are complaining about the state of affairs so I'm wondering these days is The question, you know, what is wrong with these people or those people or Instead should we be asking what is wrong with our overall system? What is wrong with the democracy that we are in the state of affairs that we are in and We can ask so what is it that we need or Probably a question that's more familiar to a lot of you the question that I've been asking myself since the campaign is What is it that I should be doing with my talents at this point in time? Given our state of affairs What do I do to try to contribute to some kind of a solution? So in the remainder of my remarks, I want to share with you one thing that I've been working on since I guess early 2017 and this is a project I've been working on with a colleague a person who's become a dear friend. His name is Deb Roy He's a scientist at MIT and he's a director of this lab called the laboratory for social machines And they've created a nonprofit organization called cortico, which is helping them deploy the things that they invent so they're at the MIT media lab and basically the laboratory for social machines is a group of designers and computer engineers and natural language processing people machine learning folks and What we've come up with is basically our answer to How do we scale up the listening that I did in Wisconsin on a on a national scale? Perhaps international we'll see how it goes, but this is where our conversation Deb and I are started Along this recognition that the way in which we communicate with each other whether we're talking social media or through traditional media Typically, it's loud and shallow and divisive and reactive and it's just not nuanced And it's often disconnected from the things that we are that we care about in our order in our everyday lives So if you go to a friend and say so what are your biggest concerns these days more often than not It's not going to be the stuff that's getting Talked about in the news, but instead it's going to be jobs and paying off your school loans and health care maybe the environment What we're aiming for is a kind of communication in which we lift up the voices of people who are underhood Underheard people who don't feel listened to People who feel as though they are overlooked or disrespected or ignored Communication that's more nuanced so as opposed to putting us into boxes or in corners Instead enables us to see the complexity of each other's views and to not simply say oh, he's one of them or he's one of them And is also just much more grounded in our everyday concerns So we've come up with this thing we call the local voices network, and here's our mission statement It's basically the attempt is to foster constructive Conversations in communities and in the media that helps us understand one another better We are basically aiming for simply a way in which we can listen to one another and understand the Perspectives of people who are unlike us or don't live near us or we that we haven't had interaction with We have grounded our work in these five values, and I'll just say them briefly This is the we keep these front and center in all of our design decisions The first one is we're trying to get people to talk about their stories about their personal experiences as Opposed to their bullet points We want people to come into a conversation and share their lives rather than their arguments on the understanding that it's when You have the opportunity to hear other people's stories that you can Actually Understand their lives better Another way of putting it is if you bring people into a conversation and say we're gonna have a conversation about climate change People are gonna show up with their their points in mind their bullet points their arguments in mind and as soon as you sit down in that conversation and people start to talk you will know who is on which side of what and more likely than not your defenses are gonna go up and You won't hear you won't actually listen to what other people have to say so we're trying to foster people Talking about their stories. We're also trying to engage as many different types of people as possible Primarily for the purpose of again of lifting up the voices of people who aren't normally heard in a so-called public conversation Project we're grounding our work in their particular communities in which we're trying out the local voices network so Every place we are We are working with the community asking people. What is it that you want? Communication to look like in your community. How do you think this should work here and tailoring it to to each? Community as we go and we're trying to be as transparent about it as as possible in terms of all of our design Decisions where the money is coming from what we're doing with the data Where the data are going because we're merging people and technology here and that hasn't gone so well recent years In many aspects and finally we want it to matter. We hope to have measurable impact So these are a few of the key things we're focusing on as we try to keep these values front and center and create this this new public Conversation network again. We're trying to lift up the voices of people who aren't normally heard We're trying to get people to listen and learn across boundaries. You can see a great deal of affinity for the work you're doing here and Again, we're trying to get people to share their own stories their personal concerns So we call it a public conversation network because at the core our small group Conversations much like the kind I was encountering in gas stations and diners where we're aiming for about six people To be led in a conversation by a facilitator all these folks are volunteers from the community And it's public in that the conversations are recorded Everyone knows they're recorded. They know they're going to be recorded from the moment they volunteer to participate and then the Conversations are shared across a community across neighborhoods in a community and across geographic space This is possible through the technology that the folks were working with at the lab and in cortical have invented So it's a scalable technology platform, which is tech lingo not not so familiar to me meaning this They've invented this thing called the digital hearth Which is this piece of wood with technology inside that it's about the size about the size of a hug and What's inside of here are is an array of microphones eight microphones a raspberry pi computer which helps Enables this thing to communicate with its controller, which I'll show you in a moment as well as a speaker So during the conversation Which is very open-ended but yet structured, which I'll say more about in a minute The host or facilitator can pause everyone and say, okay, you all have been talking about affordable housing I want you to pause for a moment and imagine that there's other people in the room with us I'm going to play you a conversations from say well Paco, Wisconsin In which people were talking about affordable housing and just imagine they're here with us and once you hear The conversation then we can reflect on it together And so through this thing we can bring in voices from other people whom these folks may not have encountered before But here's what it looks like sitting on a table the controller is basically an iPhone But we've put it in a wooden box so that doesn't feel like someone's phone on the table during a conversation These are the principles that guide the script or the guide that the host used to Guide the conversation, but basically the conversation goes like this Share your first name tell us a value that's important to you and that is related to why you're here today Then tell us a story from your background that helps us understand the person you've become Tell us what do you love about living here? And then what are you concerned about in this community and then let's listen to a voice from another place and then What do you wish would be five different five years from now and then what do you wish your elected officials knew about your life and Finally, what's one thing you're gonna be taking away from this conversation? So simple questions that so far have really sparked some thoughtful Conversations and about a wide variety of issues. So we're not telling people what to talk about part of the idea is people Have the power to set the agenda to say what's important in their communities So it's we call it community-powered understanding because it's volunteer-driven. It's it's in particular Geographies we started in Madison because that's where I live. This is a group of people training to be facilitators in Madison You can see the hearth at work here And we've also been working with the libraries. They're a huge part of the local voices network So these hearths these digital hearths live in the libraries meaning that's where they get recharged That's where the data from the conversation gets uploaded to a cloud And also the libraries help us do some recruiting but importantly and by design these things can go anywhere So librarians taught us early on that if you really want to engage a wide variety of people You need to go to them right which I think I had learned as well that if you really want to listen to people and understand How they think about their community you need to go to where they are in the course of their everyday lives So these things are portable that can go to where people are and then they come back to the library But here's just some shots from the library in Madison recruiting folks That they're tagging the hardest so they circulate just with the books Here's our very first hearth check out by a host who owns a pancake restaurant She's very excited about it took it back to her restaurant had a conversation and to the much chagrin of the engineers someone place the cup on top of it Yeah, yeah, which doesn't happen as a As far as I know but okay, so all this data right then what? Part of the idea is people encounter different points of view through the conversation itself Through the speaker playing parts of a conversation But also there's this great web interface that if you're a participant You can then log on and here and see your own conversation But also here and see the conversations of other people and you can easily search through and find Conversations about a particular topic, so just going to give you a quick overview of what this website looks like This is the the website for Madison When you open it up, there's a map and the bars show you where conversations have taken place and how many Along the side there are just snippets of different conversations I'm going to dive into one particular conversation here It's that the blue spot is where it took place when you open up a given conversation. There's this Bar that shows up that shows you who has participated along the left here And then across the top are key words that pop up so there's it's showing you what's getting talked about where in the conversation So here you can see that's where shootings was mentioned. That's where the school district was mentioned teachers Supreme Court Immigration was mentioned there then you can dial down and say here's one highlight from a conversation So highlights are created by volunteers as well as well as by me and people are fascinating the conversations You can click on one part of it and hear it I don't have the audio link to this right now and as you as it plays it highlights the words that are being said So you can follow along visually pretty easily as well as hear the person's voice But say you just want to see the full transcript You can click on the transcript read through the full transcript and again at any point If you want to hear the person saying it you can just click on it and it'll play the transcript for you so It's all By you know, it's all an experiment and we are Improving things as we go and that tab up there I was just showing you that we've now expanded to Boston, New York City Birmingham, Alabama, which is just starting up So they're actually aren't conversations up on the website yet as well as Appleton and Wapaka, Wisconsin Which Appleton is like a medium-sized city in Wisconsin will pack of the smaller Community and here what it's showing you is there's also a topic index now that just went up maybe a few weeks ago that's the result of Me highlighting parts of a conversation saying these are conversations about education and then the machine learning folks teaching Teaching the machines to look for more conversations about education and now so you can go into the page and say I want to see Some conversations about the environment show them to me in a little pop up In other words, there's much more to say here But it's a pretty awesome tool for being able to search through the conversations and now what we're working on is how do you? meld the human ability to interpret conversational data along with the capabilities of machines and we have a long way to go but It's my hope that we can Sort of find a way to go from me using post-it notes and highlighters and colored pens to using the machines to be able to understand Conversations about politics on a much larger scale than I was able to do in my Volkswagen or my Prius driving around one state another important part of this just to wrap up is that Local media outlets are amplifying What's going on in these conversations? So it's one thing to be able for volunteers to be able to log in and listen But it's another for the local media to be able to say hey look Lot of people seem to be talking about policing in schools. What are they saying and? Let me as a journalist follow up with that participant and have a more in-depth interview to understand What's going on in in that person's life or in their son or daughter's life for example so this is just one example of a outlet that we're partnering with in Madison and then these are some of the others that we're working with around the country So the ultimate hope is that at one point in time there will be one of these crazy digital hearts in every library There's 17,000 of them around the country. So we have a ways to go but so far so good and I Like you am hoping that there are there are ways We can be creative about how we listen right? We need to be creative about how we listen to one another and this I hope is is one contribution So thank you so much For your attention, and I'm really looking forward to the questions. So thank you to the students for Thank you, Dr. Kramer for your very interesting and necessary policy talk here at the Ford School My name is Kristen Richardson, and I am a first-year master's student studying public policy here at the University of Michigan The first question is how much of the rural resentment is driven by media versus more authentic sources like grassroots sources. I Don't know is the honest answer Probably a Good bit of it, but it's it's hard to tell I for The word for my book I did work with a graduate student by the name of Dave Lawson who We did a content analysis of local newspapers across the state going back to the 50s to try to get some sense of Was this a kind of sentiment in the local news? Coverage like is there a way in which we could see it in Local news and we really couldn't at all, but that's not to say it's not a part of the media. I mean I think sentiments like this are a part of Political cultures which come from so many different things. It's what we say to each other as well as what we pick up from News and popular culture movies music and such It's but it's hard. It's hard to attribute it. It's hard to quantify just how much of it comes from the media Good question. I'm Lily Alexander. I'm a sophomore here at the University of Michigan I'm here with we listen Which is a club on campus that looks to encourage dialogue across the aisle and This question is in Michigan with a lot of small township governments There is sometimes talk of consolidating into fewer larger units But is there benefit to having smaller government units closer to the people in rural areas? great question That's a difficult trade-off. I mean definitely There's a benefit for people having government close to them so that they know whom to contact if If and when they have a grievance or some issue that they they want attention on And yet so many of our local governments are so strapped for resources that consolidating up just in some respects makes sense economically But if we're just talking about The sentiment of feeling heard Getting rid of those very local governments does seem a bit dangerous The next question is do survey questions that acts if you are a Republican or a Democrat get it wrong. Is it is that just too simple? Oh That's a good question. I wouldn't say it's wrong. It's just it's a partial answer right that I Would imagine many of you in the room if you were asked the question are you a Republican Democrat independent or what? Could pick one pretty easily and yet there's more that you want to say about yourself, right? Yeah, I'm a Democrat but blah blah blah and so it's it's a just an incomplete answer It doesn't it's not the whole answer and yet, you know It's that that question Continues to be very powerful for predicting how people are going to vote or how they will stand on certain issues So it's been a very efficient question for many decades now It's just that there's also there's more to learn about people's leanings toward the parties if rural American radio Newspapers and cable are owned by closely monitored groups. How can we change this information flow? That's a great question. I mean we We so clearly need ways of Communicating and in learning about the world around us in which the the incentive Well in which divisiveness is not profitable and I Don't think we've yet discovered what what those ways of communicating are for a time We thought social media was going to enable that and that hasn't Really been a great answer. I Guess that's another I don't know. I wish I knew the answer You talk about getting people to share their stories and communities How do you plan to extend these discussions across communities? Yeah, so One way is just through this what we call cross-pollination of having for example say Group of people in the Bronx having a conversation and Being able to play for them Sentiments of people in rural Wisconsin for example and vice versa But also we were hoping that Again, like we're trying to convince ourselves to be creative about how we Amplify the voices out out of these conversations through things like podcasts volunteers creating podcasts from the materials or perhaps starting our own podcast channel or Working with public media to bring the conversations to a new community and Sparking listening across geography in that way. It's kind of kind of traveling Local voices network, but we don't we don't fully We're making it up as we go. I mean not like by the seat of our pants necessarily but The goal is to span across Geography and to expose people across geography to different perspectives and we haven't yet discovered all the ways of doing that Why use the word Resentment in your book title. It is a strong and somewhat negative word, and then they suggest a new title for your book Oh, I'd love to hear you'd love to hear it. Okay. Why not the politics of feeling quote One down and quote one. What see that's why I didn't want I don't get their new title, but The politics of feeling one down. Oh left out. Yeah Well Good the good question And it's a question I got a lot of After the 2016 election and so after the 2016 election when I felt compelled to go back to many of these groups I wanted to know I too wanted to know what they were saying, right? And so part of the reason I was going back even before the election happened was I wanted to give all them a copy Or so of the book and so I started to say so Don't hurt my feelings. I mean, don't feel like you're gonna hurt my feelings But come well, what do you how do you feel about the title of the book? Just tell me really you know and okay You have to take it with a grain of salt because are they really gonna tell me they don't like the title, but Often what would happen is people would sort of they wouldn't say anything They would just sit there and they kind of pause and they'd say well, what do you mean like? Well, do you you know? How does it sit with you? How do you how do you feel about the title and they'd say? You mean are we resentful? I said, well, yeah, like we yeah, we're resentful. So I um, I Don't have a problem with the title Nate Silver says the way to the presidency is through rule with constant voters What are the rural people from Wisconsin saying about the Democratic candidates? I don't know It's the answer because I've been immersed in creating the local voices network in and a different project that So I haven't been back to many of these communities Not really since the candidates were up and running and People have known about them. So I don't know How far back do you think the politics of resentment go? A long time I mean So, you know, we could go to ancient Greece. I mean, I mean really like You could say on one hand, you know ever since humans created anything like a city There's been this Rural urban thing going on but to not be so it's so flippant about it. Um, I would say Since I would say since the late 60s early 70s sort of the mix of Social movements and changes in our economy that that mix of things that is both Resulted in a downturn in rural economies and also This this sort of cultural backlash against many of the civil rights movements That mix of things I think has Been fuel for the the kind of sentiments that I heard in the rural rural communities How have you accounted for your identity as a white woman in having conversations with rural Americans Great question. I mean in in this kind of work. You always have to be mindful Let me put it this way that in this line of work You shouldn't fool yourself that your presence you can do something to make your presence not matter right, like I'm not just a thermometer Going into a community and taking a temperature. I'm a human being entering into relationships with people and as with any relationship like who you are who you even appear to be in the World influences how that person is going to respond to you So I guess the answer is I think about it a lot I asked myself Would this have been a different conversation had I been a different person? I try to be attentive to that I will never know For sure what it would have sounded like or looked like had I been a different person, right? but There there are certain As we move through the world all of us we're constantly making those assessments right like My position in the society as a such-and-such How is that impacting the interaction? I just had or the opportunity I just had or the the discrimination I think I just felt so I try and think about it a lot and write about it When I'm reporting my research when when I believe it's been relevant to what people have said as Populations are becoming more transient young folks moving more Coma having less stable jobs. How will place-based identity shift? Great question. I Don't know for sure, but There's been some really interesting research around language and dialects That suggests to me that Place-based identity is going to become more important at least in the near term and the research I'm referring to is based on Wisconsin and it's based on German dialects Which those of you who are specialists in linguistics or dialects may hear in my own voice That It was spurred by this recognition that the the internet and the manner in which we communication We would think that dialects rooted in kind of ethnic identities of immigrant communities from a century ago Maybe fading away right that we would expect that if anything we're all going to start talking more alike one another Over time because we're exposed Across geography much more than we used to be but instead what these folks are finding is that if anything German rooted dialects in Wisconsin are strengthening among younger generations So I think what's happening is the way we talk is a way we signal who we are in the world and There's a need for some folks to to express like I am of a certain type of place and I think that sense of feeling like you belong or feeling Like you are of a community It is a human is there's a human drive for that and so I don't I Don't know I think place-based identity will continue to be pretty important at least in the short term After doing this research for years were you as surprised as many of us about the outcome of the 2016 election? Absolutely, I mean I I got my PhD at Michigan. I believe in survey research I believe in public opinion polls and that they can Give us at least a snapshot of a moment in time So yeah, I thought Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president People want to be heard, but do you think they want to listen? Oh great question? Yeah, I mean that great. I'm saying yes to the question Yes, and no right like No, I think honestly the the quick answer this moment in time is no people don't want to listen Right, how many of you just in the room don't you not put up your hand actually don't put up your hand You make me feel bad as I'm talking. You're probably saying to yourself, you know This listening thing I'm so done with people telling me to listen like the last thing I want to do is listen 2020 is around the corner and that is the last thing we need we do not have time We need to defeat them right like I'm not I'm not about listening I'm about organizing and figuring out how to bring them down That I think is probably a more common sentiment, which is why I feel the need to be a listening evangelist Is urban elite versus rural folks the biggest divide in America? See the first part again urban elite or like Yeah No, I mean I Think if we have to choose one I would say But and it's not a clean cut divide I would say the racial Divide divides in our country Are probably is probably this the most profound But it's hard to know how to separate that from geography from economics, so But if I had to pick one I would say race the flow of tax dollars is from Urban areas to rural areas the Senate gives rural voters vastly disproportionate influence the story you recount for rural folks Is just not the truth There's no citation, so we don't know where this is coming from So what is the driver for their false narratives? Just give me a moment Okay, I Hear what you are saying and yes, you are right But I want to show you some pieces of data that will hopefully Complicate your view so this isn't a little bit of an outdated graph, but this is recovery from the recession, right? If you're a rural person, you may not see this chart, but you may look around you and say there are no jobs around here They're telling me the recession is over. There's been a recovery Where this is broadband Band penetration across the country the orange spots or where it is like you're used to here in Ann Arbor where you can actually do business Do online learning do anything basically the blue parts are where? It's kind of hard very hard This so these are a few graphs from my book I'm just going to zoom through a quick quickly here. These are the 72 counties in the state of Wisconsin and What I'm plotting here is the the taxpayer money that goes to each county and what you can see here is It's not the case that rural counties are Disadvantaged right so the farther you are on this side the dot the more rural you are It's also Not the case that rural counties are Disadvantaged in terms of federal aid if anything they're getting a little bit more right, which is exactly the question writer This is the stuff that they're referring to like when you look on a per capita basis Rural counties in Wisconsin in particular and not not any more than other states But if we're just talking about the people I was listening to They're not right right like there's more money going to rural folks I'm gonna go by here though a little bit Okay, but if you look at median household income in our rural counties It's lower if you look at who's like the percentage of people living below the poverty line It's higher and if you look at unemployment, it's higher in our rural counties So what I want to say is you know, you may say they don't know what they're talking about. They're being fooled But you can also say they don't They don't see those charts. They don't know the per capita amount of Taxpayer dollars that are coming back to them what they see is like the conditions around them and they hear who's not able to you know Get dental care or who just lost a job and so is a perception that they're worse off than the urban areas incorrect. I Don't think it's an easy answer How do you think the people you met through your research in Wisconsin feel about the title of your book? Do you think that they see themselves as resentful? Yes With the dominance of the two-party system and the issues of identifying fully with either party What's a solution? Oh Boy, I I came up with this question Stunt me I if I had the solution I Don't know if I had the solution Would it matter how would a hopeless thing to say? I mean It's one thing to have the Solution it's another to have the political power to change things, right? So we know gerrymandering might be part of the issue and you know I mean you're you're in a slightly different context here than many other states in the country or Your voters have had the chance to say yeah, we want something different, right? It's not yeah, it's not always possible to implement the solution even if you know it might help so We've gotten a couple of questions about Henry Wallace and agricultural extension in the 1930s, how do you think that factors into what we are seeing today? well Extension I think in extension is Immensely valuable Because when we think about our universities in in particular and In my book I write quite a bit about the way people talked about University of Wisconsin-Madison and the sentiment of You know you all are down there. You don't understand our lives You don't listen to us our kids can't get in when they do you don't understand them The a great way to remedy that is to actually have People of the university in the communities living with them interacting with them knowing those folks them Getting you know creating relationships, which is extension like and when I started my study I learned thankfully that our extension educators around the state are people with Very deep knowledge of the communities that they serve and so it was often the extension office I was calling to say where in such-and-such, Wisconsin do people go on a Daily basis to visit with one another to shoot the breeze and it's that kind of like Routed community rooted Daily life information that the extension folks know I think it's just an extremely valuable part of a university Not just in terms of PR not just so it looks like we're involved in the communities that our state our universities serve But so that we can actually learn and hear What is going on out there in the world in these places we can discover what their concerns are and and hopefully Not only improve our research that way But improve our ability to relate to the students who come and learn from us Was there a learning curve with your survey technology? I Since they're saying technology, I wonder if they're referring to the digital hearth Yeah, there's yeah, it's a constant learning curve like and thankfully It's so I'm working with this team of engineers and so by their nature there They're used to and trained in creating things like Pulling together as much knowledge as possible to create something and then deploying it and then carefully attending to feedback and then revising it and so it's been an awesome experience and just it's a different kind of learning for me where it Usually in my previous work I'd work on something and polish it as much as possible and then Put it out there in the world and these folks of that the the sensibility is a little bit different It's like get it out there as soon as you possibly can so that we can learn and improve it So yeah, it's it's a constant learning curve. I don't know if it's steep. It feels steep What is it? What is the demographic of voices you're getting it? Well, it depends on the community in Madison The the typical participant is as you might expect a white middle-aged middle class Relatively well educated person, but there's a wide variety. There's about About 29% of our facilitators are people of color most people are Most of the facilitators are upper income the participants It's a little bit harder to say because we have not yet started collecting demographic information on people by choice because we The philosophy behind the local voices network is we want people to see the nuance in each other And we have not we've been very reluctant to ask people We want you to see and hear the nuance in each other But can now can you put yourself in some of these boxes for us so that we can better You know under matter of make sense of the data So we're trying to figure out a way to give people a lot of leeway in describing who they are to us and yet capturing information on who the participants are so we think that we're capturing or Engaging a wide range of people But I don't have numbers to share you on what I mean by that share with you on what I mean by that the technology analytic potentials are Neat could it be alienating and limiting in terms of who will use it. Yeah, I mean, it's weird, right like Yeah, there's so many people who are wary of technology and especially when we say this These things are recording what you're saying, right? It'd be many people who are wary of participating in that so We are that's that's partly the driver behind us trying to be as transparent as possible So trying to make it clear to people Where the data are going how we're protecting it? what the purpose is and We recognize I mean it's like good community organizing I guess and that it's we've Understand that it's about relationship building about people getting to know what the local voices network is and having an experience in it and Developing trust over time as they see what we do with it and what the local journalists do with it and hopefully what? local policymakers what the good use that they can put it to So I hear I hear you Another thing though is that we've been a bit surprised at just how much people do What their voices? Heard and recorded so on the other hand There are many people who say if my voice is going to be heard. Yes I you need technology to amplify it and I'm happy to participate to get my voice out there Was it easy to be accepted into certain rigid ideological circus circles I don't they weren't rigid Like yeah, I they didn't it was easy. I mean It's very rare for people to be asked Do you mind if I sit down with you and listen to What your concerns are and? And my experience is once people know that I'm genuine about that that that really is why I'm there I'm not trying to fool them in any way like I was telling students earlier today I'm like, I'm not trying to tell you anything not running for office not trying to tell you Why you're wrong as soon as they understand that I actually know my purpose in being there is to listen People were very welcoming and I They didn't it I guess it's a longer comment longer answer than I have time for but it didn't feel as though I had somehow magically passed over some threshold and gotten myself invited into an exclusive club never felt like that How have your beliefs changed since starting talking to other people? I think my Very rarely I Think does listening change our beliefs and I and I would say that is not why I think listening is important Instead what it does is helps you see the humanity in the other people and helps you probably better understand yourself So if my beliefs have changed it's been I think I have a stronger sense of what I value in this world and the kind of Human interactions that I think are important and that I strive To replicate or have around me But I don't think my position I don't think my position on any policy issue has really changed or my own Political leanings. I don't think that's what good listening usually results in When you say you picked up racism in the conversations, can you elaborate? Sure So the most common way is when People are talking about Education policy and They'd be reflecting on kind of where the school funding formula sends money in the state People would talk about Milwaukee and and talk about how you know, we've sent That city so much money and and look at those schools look at those places and there would be kind of assessments of Kind of cultural poverty assessments and You know More money is not going to solve the problem because the problem is the way I'm just not even going to repeat it, but I would say in conversations about education is probably where it was most common and Yeah, I'd rather not elaborate on the stereotypes I'd heard So this is going to be our last question Can you elaborate on how people at Michigan or in Ann Arbor can get involved? Oh Sure with LVM great all you have to do. Let's go to LVM org Send an email just express interest and say local voices network Sounds pretty interesting. Could we possibly start up a chapter here? You could also it That would probably take some time. We're expanding There's there's no real formula for what it means to open a new chapter So it might be some time before a chapter would start up in Ann Arbor or near Ann Arbor But you might volunteer to be a curator Which is a person who goes into the conversations and lifts out highlights and kind of writes notes about I think other people should hear this and here's why And you can email me too Very good. Well, thank you if you want to join me again in thanking dr. Kramer for her talk and if you like me want to talk to her more We are lucky that she'll still be on campus for another couple of days and actually back in this building for breakfast on Friday This is when the rural America working group that close-up is part of that's a it's a rack of interdisciplinary group for faculty staff students across campus who have interests in research interests in rural America an opportunity to get together and Dr. Kramer will be joining us then so there's a couple spots left. It's a small breakfast Just see me afterwards and we can add you to the list. So thank you again right now We are ready. There's a reception that we hope you'll join us for right after. Thank you