The Bifurcation of Racial Justice Discourse - Incite at Columbia University

Incubated Project

The Bifurcation of Racial Justice Discourse

Colin Leach is leading a multi-disciplinary team that works in a trans-disciplinary way to better understand how Black Lives Matter—the meme and the movement—moves people for, against, and away from racial justice in the U.S. and U.K.

The team, including Shaunette T. Ferguson and Nikhi Anand is examining the unprecedented use of Black Lives Matter (labels and content) for online discussion of racial justice in the summer of 2020 (after the murder of George Floyd) in comparison to previous time periods.

With support from Incite, Leach's team is adopting a systematic approach to evaluate the schismogenesis—a phenomenon where discourse bifurcates into polarized communities—by investigating peaks in online discussions using large datasets, including Freelon et al.'s and Giorgi et al.'s Twitter Corpus, along with the ACLED dataset for U.S. protests.

This research aims to identify intervention strategies for promoting constructive discussions and shared commitments to racial equality.

More Projects

  • go to Global Investigative Journalism Oral History
    Global Investigative Journalism Oral History
    Recording, preserving, and presenting the histories of the investigative journalism movement. Funded by Incite Institute
  • go to Terra:Soul
    Terra:Soul
    Environmental storytelling with the concept of reciprocity at its core.
  • go to Embodied Earth
    Embodied Earth
    Breaking through climate knowledge silos with collaborative, interactive public performances driven by research. Part of Assembling Voices
  • go to Columbia University Narrative Intelligence Lab
    Columbia University Narrative Intelligence Lab
    Drawing from literary theory, sociology of knowledge, linguistics, and computation to study how stories shape our personal and shared beliefs.