I have been awarded two major research grants to continue my exploration of the role of emotions and affect in circulating social media and disinformation related to narratives of racial and national belonging, in the context of the upcoming 2019 Canadian election and the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.
This spring, I was awarded a three-year Insight Grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, titled “Digital Dissenters and Polarized Politics: Affect, Identity, and Social Media in the U.S. and Canadian Elections”. With a Research Team of brilliant graduate students — six qualitative and two quantitative researchers — we have commenced our mixed-methods study of social media related to the October 21, 2019 Canadian Federal election.
I was also awarded a research grant from the Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge which supports the appointment of two Research Assistants to conduct sentiment analysis of large-scale data sets provided by McGill University partners in the Digital Ecosystem Research Project. This project is entitled “Affective Media, Social Movements, and Digital Dissent: Emotions and Democratic Participation in the ‘Post-Truth’ Era.”