Papers

Stacy Clifford Simplican, Senior Lecturer, Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies  Last week, the Vanderbilt Project on Unity & American Democracy launched the Vanderbilt Unity Lab. They are now accepting applications from students, faculty and staff to fill 25 program training positions.   I applied immediately. Read More

What does it mean to be misinformed—and who consumes misinformation? It can be hard to track down measured answers to those questions. Often framed as a problem that ‘others’ encounter, the public discourse surrounding misinformation can also be highly reductive.   Undergraduate researchers and 2022 Buchanan Fellows, William… Read More

By Dr. Alex Jahangir  The following excerpt was adapted from Hot Spot: A Doctor’s Diary from the Pandemic, a memoir of the first year of COVID in Nashville by Dr. Alex Jahangir, head of the Metro Nashville COVID-19 Task Force. Published by Vanderbilt University Press… Read More

By Caroline Friedman Levy, Ph.D., and Matthew Facciani, Ph.D.  Even in these polarized times, policymakers across the ideological spectrum can find common ground on artificial intelligence. Members of Congress from both parties are rooting for AI’s potential to help us cure pediatric cancers and solve some of our… Read More

By Leonora Zilkha Williamson  As the calendar turns toward the next election, I think often of a dinner I tried to organize five years ago with two childhood friends (we’re all nearing 50 and spent youthful summers on the beach). The effort failed because of politics. One friend, an ardent… Read More

Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy releases second quarterly Vanderbilt Unity Index data measuring Americans’ faith and trust in democracy   Americans’ general faith and trust in democracy has stabilized in the first half of 2022, remaining relatively flat through the second quarter, according to the… Read More

Read Dean John Geer and Mary Catherine Sullivan’s recent piece in the Washington Post about the Vanderbilt Unity Index. The new measure of national unity examines shifts over decades, and tells a better story than you might think. Read More

A new index designed by researchers at Vanderbilt University shows a steady erosion of trust in American political institutions over the past 40 years, with it hitting its lowest point in 2017 after racial unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Launched by the Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy, the… Read More

Service-learning’s role in promoting active citizenship and unifying a community By Billy O’Steen, Associate Professor of service-learning at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand “It was the first time I was happy to see a group of university students coming down my street,” said a… Read More

SUMMARY Unifying Theme: Hope for Consensus Across Party Lines: A Student Project While political partisans may not agree on much these days, 40 current and former elected officials interviewed by Vanderbilt students in the spring of 2021 agreed on leadership competencies to successfully work across the aisle, build coalitions and… Read More