Research

This report was written by Aaron Shapiro (Ph.D. '18), MIC Center postdoctoral research fellow.

Sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) — which include things such as sports drinks, non-diet sodas, energy drinks, fruit drinks, and flavored milk products — cause dental erosion and cavities and play a significant role in health concerns such as obesity and diabetes. Although soda consumption is declining, sports and energy drinks remain popular among youth, in part because of confusion regarding their potential health benefits.

Over winter break, while many undergraduates were busy catching up on sleep, Communication major Amanda Damon (C’19) was collecting data on immigration and civil rights legislation and reform for her senior honors thesis. For months, she had been corresponding with librarians and archivists at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas and the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California in preparation to visit them in January.

Over the last two decades, the standard of living has risen for many in Vietnam, but there has also been an increase in fears around adulterated or toxic food. In light of this, many Vietnamese mothers are faced with immense anxiety over the well-being of their children.

Postdoctoral Fellow Giang Nguyen-Thu, a Vietnamese mother herself, has been conducting fieldwork in Vietnam to investigate how the internet — and particularly social media — shape the ways these mothers deal with their concerns about food, education, and the environment.

How do political communication and other forms of information affect a civil society? How does political polarization impact information sharing, voting, and other parts of American democracy?

The Democracy & Information Group (DIG), a newly established working group led by Professor Yphtach Lelkes, aims to answer these questions. The group brings together graduate students interested in researching topics related to political communication, particularly how new media impact polarization and incivility.

The Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication is proud to present CARGC Paper 10, “Contextualizing Hacktivism: The Criminalization of Redhack” by Bülay Doğan (Koç University).

Through an empirical examination of the criminalization of the Turkish hacktivist group Redhack in social, legal, and cultural discourses, Doğan explores the critical conflation of hacktivism with cyber-terrorism that enables states to criminalize non-violent hacktivist groups.

A new study from alumna Robin Stevens and senior research scientist Amy Bleakley surveyed black and Hispanic youth about their social media experiences, finding that as many as 84% report exposure to risk-related content but only a fifth actually post such material.

Over the past 30 years, violent conflicts have taken more than two million lives and caused millions more to become refugees. Often, this violence stems from unresolved intergroup conflict, between Turks and Kurds, Burmese and Rohingya, or Israelis and Palestinians.

Ozan Kuru, an Annenberg Public Policy Center postdoctoral fellow, is part of a team that has been awarded a misinformation and social science research grant from WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging platform which has 1.5 billion users.

At least 120 countries around the world require pictorial warning labels on cigarette packages — for example gangrene feet or a dead body — but the United States is notably missing from the list. Despite a 2009 congressional act instructing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to implement pictorial warning labels, American cigarette packs still contain text-only warning labels. A new court order issued in September 2018 says the FDA must speed up its timeline for the implementation of pictorial warning labels.