2020-2021 Fellow

 
Ewa Golebiowska

Recording of Lecture

Project Title: "Membership in a stigmatized religious minority and political support: Nonbelievers running for office in the United States"

Nonbelievers, variously termed "atheists," "agnostics," "religiously unaffiliated," "nones," and "religion's other" are a fast-growing religious minority in the United States. Even though their ranks have been growing, prejudice toward them continues to be higher than toward almost any other religious minority in the country. Research using the survey design suggests that anti-atheist prejudice is linked with perceptions of atheists as immoral and untrustworthy. Some nascent experimental research explores how atheists are evaluated when they run for political office. In contrast, we do not know how other types of nonbelievers are evaluated when they run for political office and under what circumstances they earn more or less political support.

In this project, I examine how nonbelievers atheists and their fellow travelers are evaluated when they run for political office in the United States. Specifically, I experimentally examine several questions that build on existing scholarship. First, I investigate how the label used to describe a candidate's lack of religious beliefs is linked with political evaluation. Second, given that one's religious beliefs are generally invisible to the social perceiver, I examine how the timing and manner of disclosure of a candidate's religious identity influence voters' responses to her or him. Third, I investigate how the impact of a candidate's membership in a stigmatized religious minority and the timing and manner of its disclosure might depend on whether voters face the candidate in a primary election when they typically share their party identification with candidates on the ballot or a general election when voters face the candidates from across the partisan spectrum. Finally, I consider how voters' own religiosity, partisanship, right-wing authoritarianism, and egalitarianism condition all these effects.

2019-2020 Fellows

Ljiljana Progovac, Professor, English 
Project Title: "Language Evolution, Self-Domestication, and Verbal Aggression"

Over the past twelve years I have been developing a theory of language evolution, focusing on grammar (syntax). My work on the reconstruction of proto-grammar has been published in several journal articles, as well as two single-authored books (Evolutionary Syntax, Oxford University Press, 2015, and A Critical Introduction to Language Evolution, Springer Expert Briefs, 2019). This work leads to a surprising hypothesis that the reconstructed early grammars were especially suitable for the expression of colorful derogatory language, i.e. insult. This finding led to the cross-fertilization with Dr. Benítez-Burraco's work, which considers cognitive disorders in the light of the self-domestication hypothesis of human origins. This cross-fertilization brings together verbal aggression of my proposal, and the gradual reduction in (reactive) physical aggression in humans, taken to be the hallmark of self-domestication.

Dr. Benítez-Burraco and I are now working on several joint papers and projects, including co-editing a special journal issue of Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society B on the theme of Reconstructing Prehistoric Languages. We have also been invited to contribute a chapter on the biology of language for the Cambridge Handbook on Minimalism. Last year I gave thirteen lectures on the topic of language evolution, including at MIT; Harvard; Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan; Poznań, Poland; Crete, Greece; Pavia, Italy; Leipzig, Germany. My goal is to further influence the trajectory of developments in this fast-moving field, ultimately contributing to a better understanding of language and cognitive disorders, as well as of what made us human in the process of evolution.

Nicole Trujillo- Pagan, Associate Professor, Sociology

Project Title: "American Dreams, Latina/o/x Realities: Remapping the Relationship between Space, Race and Opportunity."

We take space for granted. We rely on the natural sciences to define the concept for us. What most often fail to consider is that both space and borders are cause and consequence of the social. In particular, borders are continually challenged and re-asserted as groups struggle to control or, alternately, access, and use space.

This project is focused on Latina/o/x youth, many of whom live in Southwest Detroit, who struggle to cross to cross a variety of socio-spatial border that impede their mobility. These struggles underscore how a local neighborhood is shaped in relation to regional, national, and international actors. I rely on a variety of ethnographic, administrative, and archival data to demonstrate how their struggles are mapped beyond abstractions like social mobility. I argue border struggles are fundamentally about how we think about and use space.