Lauren Young
Description: Lauren Young is an Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Davis. Her research examines the dynamics of decision-making in the context of political violence and the challenges of collective action in post-conflict settings. In this episode, we discuss her work on Zimbabwe’s 2018 election, where she explains how citizens navigate political uncertainty in a competitive autocracy. Additionally, we examine the ethical dimension of her research, emphasizing how transparent practices, genuine community engagement, and a deep understanding of local contexts can help build initiatives that truly serve and empower the communities of interest.
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Show Notes:
[0:06] Early Inspirations and Experiences
[6:06] Research in Zimbabwe's 2018 Election
[9:06] Understanding Regime Types
[15:04] Political Protests and Engagement
[17:52] The Role of Social Media
[24:24] Strategies for Political Change
[27:13] Ethical Considerations in Research
[57:21] Researching Political Violence
[1:04:20] Emotional Responses to Research
[1:10:11] Challenges in Implementation
[1:15:36] Advice for Aspiring Researchers
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Brent:
[0:00] Welcome, Professor Lauren Young. Thank you for coming on today.
Keller:
[0:03] Thank you so much for inviting me, and thank you for joining us.
Keller:
[0:06] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit more about what got you interested in studying political science and how you ended up at UC Davis.
Brent:
[0:13] That's a big question. So, when I was an undergrad, I went into my undergraduate studies already.
Lauren:
[0:22] Knowing I was really interested in public service. I grew up in the Bay Area and had been tutoring kids in a homeless shelter, and that was kind of like maybe the most formative experience for me. And when I got to undergrad, I came across this opportunity to do what's called like a volunteerism trip where, you know, young people are like purportedly volunteering to help others, but, you know, really are just kind of getting exposed to like a different place, different cultures. Um so uh yeah so i kind of you know having come in with an interest in public service um then like saw this opportunity to do public service but also to learn about you know in this case it was zambia working with refugees from congo um so that really got me like started on the research topics that have always that that have since then been kind of like my yeah passion around trying to understand how people, you know, make decisions in context of violence, which was something that, you know, at the time I found just really mind-bogglingly hard to imagine, right?
Lauren:
[1:35] And yeah, and over the course of, you know, the next few years, I did a couple of different, kind of internships or low-level jobs to try to directly affect that and ultimately ended up Kind of turning more towards policy and research and trying to figure out ways to kind of make, in roundabout ways, to try to make like our efforts to, you know, prevent violence or help people kind of cope with its effects more effectively.
Brent:
[2:05] And then what was your first experience abroad conducting research?
Lauren:
[2:10] So conducting research. So my first experience doing research, although it was still pretty applied, was in Liberia. So after I finished college, I, again, I knew I actually took a year off of college because I wanted to actually work and, you know, like help people immediately. Um, uh, but then after, after I finally finished, um, I, um, applied for internships primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, um, and, uh, got this job. Um, I think my title was, uh, what was it? Like reporting and communications intern.
Brent:
[2:48] Like very, very unimportant.
Lauren:
[2:51] Um, I will not tell you what I did get paid, but it was like nothing. But I kind of like was able to spin that job into a way to do my first research project because they had these grants that were closing. This was in Liberia and this was in 2008. So it was kind of a couple of years after the civil war in Liberia had ended. And there was like a wave of aid spending that was kind of winding down. And so they had this big program that was designed to help people who had come back into Liberia from like Guinea or Sierra Leone, who had left as refugees to restart businesses. And they weren't going to like evaluate it. So, you know, they didn't have a plan to find out if it had worked or not.
Lauren:
[3:38] And so the first project that I did, I think they gave me, you know, they had like an extra $2,000 or something like that and some staff who they, you know, no longer like needed to implement the program. And so we drove up around the parts of the country where this program had happened and that had been affected by the war and interviewed people about... Had they gotten out of it? What was their life like generally? And I found the whole, yeah, well, I'll stop there. Yeah. So that was my first kind of research experience where I got to ask people questions and in a more systematic way to try to figure out like how they were making decisions in a context of violence.
Keller:
[4:21] Were there any key moments in that first research trip in Liberia that maybe there were failures that kind of opened your eyes to how to navigate conducting research in a foreign country better.
Lauren:
[4:30] Yeah um that's a really good question and so i would say it was largely that work in liberia that finally pushed me into wanting to not do on the ground service provision but to do research because um i kind of came out of that so i had been in zambia i did an internship in tanzania and then i ended up in liberia And I came out of those three experiences feeling like we didn't really have the model down for helping, you know, civil society activists improve governance or, you know, refugees coming back into the country restart productive lives. And so I guess that was one kind of like, yeah, lesson learned from something that didn't work. That's more on the implementation side or like policy side than on the research side. I think on the research side, I have more experiences of lessons learned from later. I think that when I just kind of, my main realization was just, wow, this is amazing that we can learn from people in this way if we, you know, just listen to them. And, you know, I don't think that report was super impactful, but it was.
Lauren:
[5:51] I don't know. Using interviews, also traveling around with the staff from this program and having that very close relationship with a set of people with a shared goal, but from very different backgrounds. All of that was a really positive experience for me.
Brent:
[6:06] I think kind of pivoted to some of your more recent work in academia. Why did you choose Zimbabwe's 2018 election as a case study? Yeah.
Lauren:
[6:19] So I started working in and kind of studying Zimbabwean politics when I was an early PhD student. So for, you know, the past like 10 plus years, 10 or 12 years, it's been a focus of mine. And um when i started kind of traveling to zimbabwe and studying zimbabwe it was really in this period of uh pretty clear stagnation um like the opposition party had been around for 14 15 years but you know was kind of on a downward trend um and um and then this 2018 election came around and it had been preceded like within a year before that election the um there had been a coup that replaced the you know first um majority role president of zimbabwe robert mongabe and also the head of the historic opposition party had died okay um so it was like going from you know this total gridlock stagnation to no one seemed to know what was going to happen, In hindsight, we can always say, oh, it was obvious that the ruling party was still going to win. But there was a lot of uncertainty in public perceptions and even in elite perceptions. And so I found that really interesting. Like we wanted to understand, you know, how do people make decisions in this potentially pivotal place?
Keller:
[7:46] And with that, like those moments of uncertainty is kind of how it's worded in the paper. Is that like a defined time frame between an election or how would you like describe that, I guess, period of like a political movement?
Lauren:
[7:59] Yeah, this is one of those political science concepts that's a little bit squishy. And, you know, I think, like, we think of a moment of uncertainty in that case as a moment where people's expectations of what was going to happen were fairly loose, right? And, you know, we kind of give some examples. So I think, you know, moments of like transitions between leadership are one example. You know, moments where there are protests, right, that kind of bring an issue to the fore that wasn't there before. I think that would be that could be another example of a moment of uncertainty. But ultimately, like there's no, you know, kind of quantitative definition. And I've never seen like, you know, a data set that tries to say like, okay, we can say there were four moments of uncertainty in Tunisian politics or, you know, it's one of those things where it's kind of like, you know, it when you see it, right. And I don't know, that's a downside in terms of being able to study it in a systematic way.
Lauren:
[9:02] But like, some things are like that. in politics yeah could.
Keller:
[9:07] You also describe like the i guess like the regime type of the political structure in zimbabwe because it isn't fully democrat but isn't fully authoritarian.
Lauren:
[9:14] Either yes yes yes so that's right so we call it a kind of um yeah competitive autocracy or some researchers have talked about this as like a kind of gray zone um or uh you know hybrid regimes Right. Regimes that kind of combine elements of autocracy and democracy. And since the end of the Cold War, this is the dominant regime type when it comes to autocracies. There's only a handful of autocracies that do.
Lauren:
[9:46] I think it's something like five, right? There are five countries that have not held national elections in the past 10 or 15 years. And so, but it's not that all, it's not that like, you know, 180 whatever countries in the world are now democracies, right? Um, so this type of regime, you know, it's, it's hard sometimes to draw a line between, um, a, you know, democratic regime where one party dominates because they're popular, right? That would be a case like, um, Botswana is often thought of as one of these with the, um, the, yeah, Botswana, um, you know, ruling party, which like their elections are pretty good, right? Right. So it seems to be democratic. If there were an opposition party that were popular, they probably would win. And then the ruling party would probably step down. In Zimbabwe, that's not the case. Right. In kind of, yeah, like competitive autocracies, the playing field is tilted to the extent that there's just really no chance that the opposition can win. Where they have to, you know, to win, they would have to have such a huge majority and kind of combine an electoral win with, you know, like a bunch of people power in terms of mobilizing people that it just can't be considered a real democracy. So, yeah. So that's the that's the concept.
Brent:
[11:15] And to give a little bit more detail on the election in 2018 in Zimbabwe, what were you trying to understand about that moment of uncertainty?
Lauren:
[11:26] So we really wanted to understand how does an average citizen see events in these moments and react to them? And there is a pretty big literature in political science and sociology and economics about how do people react to seeing protests happening? Like, does it make you more likely to go out and protest if you see others doing it? Or does it make you less likely? Um, and, uh, and there's also a pretty big literature on how people react to seeing repression, right? Um, you know, repression seems designed to deter us from participating in protest or other forms of dissent. Um, but often there are lots of cases where it mobilizes people. Um, and so a lot of this literature, I guess this literature has been hard to, you know, it's hard to study these things because they're very dynamic and, you know, in many cases where oppression is happening. It's really dangerous to get data from people. So we wanted to, you know, in this especially, you know, potentially pivotal moment, this potential moment of change, we wanted to understand how people would make those decisions and kind of update and react in real time.
Brent:
[12:38] And then what were the decisions like whether or not to protest, like who they voted for in the election, whether they speak out, like kind of?
Lauren:
[12:43] Yep. Yeah. So we, in a lot of my research, like we think about, um, you know, dissent as just ways that people, um, kind of take action from like small ways, like, you know, telling your neighbor that you don't support a ruling party to big things like protest. Um, you know, even like rebellion could be right. That's like an armed form of dissent, although that's not relevant in Zimbabwe.
Brent:
[13:08] Way.
Lauren:
[13:10] And so, you know, I think one of the assumptions that we make in the paper is that even little acts of dissent are actually quite important when you're in a repressive context, right? Because they signal, I mean, that's one of the findings that we have, yeah, that they can signal to people. So in terms of the outcome, in the paper, we focus on your willingness to participate in protest, actually over like public services, because that was something that was relevant both for people who support the ruling party and for opposition supporters. But we also measured things like, would you be willing to wear a t-shirt for the party that you support? Or would you be willing to post on social media something, you know, in favor of the party that you support? So yeah, it's kind of, it's quite a range.
Keller:
[13:57] And what were some of the factors that pushed people to engage in political protests beyond just maybe, you know, you're saying like other people engaging in protests that might entice you to join or repression in some cases could push other aspects that you saw yeah.
Lauren:
[14:10] You're kind of asking like what are the underlying forces um, That's a good question. So in this case, there are like decades of economic grievances that have built up, often in cities. So around the time of, you know, this election, there were, you know, memes on social media of people saying like, I'm a college graduate and I'm trying to sell water in the street because there are no jobs. Right. I would say economic grievances are a big push factor. And then some people, especially more like student activists or people who are really involved in politics at a high level, also just care about having a democratic
Lauren:
[15:03] government for its own sake. Like the opposition party is called, or it used to be called, I should say, the Movement for Democratic Change. Right so there's i would say those are the two main um kind of underlying uh push factors or like grievances that get people into um protest in this case yeah.
Keller:
[15:23] And then you mentioned the social media aspect of people's willingness to post i'm curious like what were those findings in terms of like how willing they were and could could there be any comparisons to the u.s that are like yeah people seem to not really think too much before posting on social media list It seems like almost a given if you have an opinion. Putting it on social media is the natural progression. Did you see any pushback there?
Lauren:
[15:48] That that's interesting so yeah i think that is quite different um although yeah i might disagree with you that people would put anything on social media here um i can come back to that but um yeah i think in in this context and maybe we'll talk later about this study that i did um on like in whatsapp groups um where you know we looked at um i worked with an opposition party a minor one and you know, the outcome that they were interested in is whether people would directly say that they support the opposition party and how enthusiastic they would be in these WhatsApp groups. And they considered that to be meaningful because, you know, you never know who's listening. And, you know, I would say there's, you know, people do often in Zimbabwe reveal their political beliefs, but they know in the back of their mind that if they say that to the wrong person or if they say it in the wrong way that there could be.
Lauren:
[16:50] So the reason I say it might not be that different from the U.S. Is that, you know, in Zimbabwe, it's more organized, right? It's kind of regime down in many cases. But here there are social costs to posting kind of counter group norm content on social media. So I think that would be like the way to kind of try to imagine it, right? Like posting like a pro-Trump message in like a very democratic circle of friends or something like that, right? They're different but you know that's the yeah there could be something that would happen you'd probably be fine but um or vice versa right with a pro-democratic uh message and in a trump pro-trump community.
Brent:
[17:31] Yeah and then uh earlier you talked about if you see a protest are you more likely to join a like maybe like i'm assuming that is the case and then does it need to be seeing in person or could it be like see on social media maybe even seeing on social media in a different country emboldening them to protest.
Lauren:
[17:49] Their own.
Brent:
[17:50] Dislike dislikes and grievances like.
Lauren:
[17:52] Yeah how.
Brent:
[17:53] Do you think about that.
Lauren:
[17:54] That's a great question so one of the things that actually surprised me in these findings is that in this within country context um we find that like you know face-to-face or neighborhood level exposure to both protest and repression um is much stronger than exposure on social media um and you know we can talk about like why that might be or um you know what questions that raises um but um you know yeah i think one of the big takeaways from from this project is you know when it comes to trying to make a decision about um you know yeah engaging in dissent against a repressive um incumbent regime um like you don't want to do it with other people who may not be next to you on social media like you want to do it uh with people at the local level like that's the kind of like level at which this power in numbers type of um effect seems to matter um when it comes to cross-border i think there may be something different happening with cross-border mobilization um and um yeah one of my phd students actually works on uh like protest diffusion um and um yeah and i would say like the kind of general finding in that literature is that um protests can diffuse across borders and you know it may be something about um you know realizing that it's possible to change a you know pretty entrenched.
Lauren:
[19:21] Authoritarian regime um.
Keller:
[19:27] And kind of touching back on the social media study, what was kind of the, I guess, main avenue of social media? You mentioned WhatsApp. Were there other platforms that were used and how did you procure that data? That seems like it would be like really complicated to get in the first place. Yeah.
Lauren:
[19:45] So WhatsApp and to a somewhat lesser extent, Facebook were and continue to be really popular in Zimbabwe and in many, yeah, kind of outside the West context. And, yeah, I found it really useful for research, both to, you know, kind of measure people's beliefs, experiences in a pretty kind of under-the-radar and private way. And then also like the example I gave of, you know, this work with the opposition party, like to see how people react to different types of campaign messages, because they are getting, you know, political messages, religious messages, family messages, like in big WhatsApp conversations.
Lauren:
[20:32] Um, so yeah, in terms of how to use it, um, like the two practices of using it to measure and using it to kind of, um, yeah, like work with a group that's trying to mobilize people are very different. Um, and I would say on the measurement side, um, you know, we, uh, like the hardest part about it was, was kind of recruiting people to participate in this study over WhatsApp. Um, and, uh, but ultimately I think it, it kind of let us talk to them in a way where, you know, they didn't have a surveyor showing up at their doorstep, right. Who might be seen by people in the neighborhood. And it also, at the time, we did a bunch of qualitative research to try to figure out, is WhatsApp hacked? People, I think, rightly have worries about that or whether the data is being given to governments like the government of Zimbabwe or things like that. But we were pretty convinced that it wasn't in that case, although that's not always true.
Lauren:
[21:44] And so, yeah, by doing WhatsApp voice calls, right, it didn't leave any kind of trace of what someone had told us. And so, yeah, for all of those reasons, it kind of met our threshold of it seems private enough and also importantly seems like much more private than like the traditional ways of doing surveys so that we could get this like repeated measurement in this sensitive period.
Brent:
[24:25] So with your work in Zimbabwe especially looking at like social media like what people like what are the influences happening there yeah with those findings like how can opposition groups or groups kind of going up against a pretty large force use like some of those findings to like better inform their strategy about trying to get a political change Yeah.
Lauren:
[24:48] Yeah, I really like this question. So when I was thinking about this question, I had two reactions. And I think one is to go back to this idea that local matters. Um, you know, yeah, a lot of opposition movements, um, or just, you know, kind of social justice movements more generally are underfunded, right? It's hard, um, to build robust, um, like physical structures, right? Or, you know, personal structures of people. um but um you know i think that this i think that one of the takeaways from this um article is that that really matters and you know hearing about things from your neighbors from yeah from people locally um is what is what matters um not just pushing it out on social media um could be different in the u.s context but you know that's a caveat that we always give with uh yeah and then And I think the other thing, and we can talk about this more when we talk about emotional reactions to different events, but I think the other kind of takeaway is it's kind of this mix of hope or optimism or credibility even that as an opposition movement you have a chance at winning and something more about anger or grievances.
Lauren:
[26:15] So, you know, something that I think is a kind of unanswered question so far in my work is, you know, my hunch is that you need both of those. And I think qualitatively what you see in this paper is, you know, it's in this moment of uncertainty. I can't say only because we don't have the counterfactual, but, you know, I think that exposure to repression outside of this moment of uncertainty in Zimbabwe may not be mobilizing, right? Because people, they don't have any reason to believe that something might happen.
Lauren:
[26:45] And this did peter out. Ultimately, while it was mobilizing in the short term, it wasn't enough to get a mass protest movement that would bring about the political change that they were trying to get.
Keller:
[27:14] Is there like a particular set of data that you would need to kind of make that link? Like, how would you get that linkage in like an ideal magic wand scenario? Yeah.
Lauren:
[27:26] So, yeah, in an ideal magic wand scenario, you would have data like this across a bunch of different, you know, maybe a bunch of different elections, right? And you would be able to see, oh, okay, you know, this is an election where, like, let's imagine, I think you could come up with some kind of plausible way of saying this one is a moment of uncertainty, this one is not. You know maybe based on yeah like the presence of things like leadership change or whether there was protest before or something like that and then you'd want to test that you know across hundreds of different elections we don't currently have that data but there has been a really great study that was done across five different periods in in russia although it was kind of across multiple parts of the Soviet Union, where they found that, like, where they found some evidence for this. This is work by two, or by a professor at NYU, Arturis Rozenas, and some co-authors. And so I think there's, you know, we're starting to get some evidence for this, that, you know, yeah, when people have grievances, and there's this opportunity, that that's when, you know, it's mobilizing, right? Like, not when, like, it's demobilizing when people have reason to believe that there's no there's no chance.
Brent:
[28:49] Yeah and then kind of shifting a bit because you mentioned it briefly before like your work on emotions and like that as a tool for political change like how do like politicians or like groups use emotions effectively.
Lauren:
[29:07] So, that's a big question. So, starting from my research, you know, the study that I did on this was in partnership with this minor opposition.
Lauren:
[29:21] Party that went on to become part of the, like, big opposition coalition in.
Lauren:
[29:25] The 2018 election, actually. Um and they were a very kind of positive mess positive valenced party um they are a deeply religious party um and uh you know really we're trying to stress this message of hope and and credibility like one of their main campaign strategies was to um like go around in different neighborhoods and like repair streets using rocks that you know were there so they just wanted to show like look we really are going to do something about bad public services if you vote for us like we're not just here to yeah like campaign and you know then spin it into like consultancies or you know something else right um and so they had that base of you know we are credible we are hopeful um and then they wanted to work with me to test whether um you know a more grievance-based or a purely enthusiastic message would be better at mobilizing people mobilizing their constituents to like get involved in the party um and so we we found i mean you guys saw this paper like we found that um the you know more anger based message was actually more effective in getting people to participate in these whatsapp discussions in ways that that show enthusiasm for the party um and uh and also just in.
Lauren:
[30:53] Um, so, you know, I think that that's kind of, and to, to explain what they, what they did, like they had a kind of like drama type message, this, um, like video about, um, a grandmother who had a sick granddaughter and, and they did two versions of it. One where, you know, it was just hopeful and it was just like, this is what we're going to give you if, you know, if you vote for us. And the other one was more grievance based. Like the message was, you know, now there's no medicine in our clinics and, you know, there's no transportation to get to the hospital when you're sick. And people ask for bribes when you show up at clinics, but we're going to change it. Right. So it's that combination. I think like both that combination was necessary in the message itself and also was necessary in the context in that this was not just a grievance, grievance, grievance party. But I suspect that that message, the grievance message was especially powerful because they had this base of like, we can do this, we're credible, you know, be hopeful.
Brent:
[31:57] Yeah i could definitely see the grievance being like the hook that gets people in motivated and then a hopeful message is like okay now i have something tangible to go aim for.
Lauren:
[32:07] I think that's right.
Keller:
[32:08] Is there a distinction or a way of looking at like once people were engaged you saw the changes in social media i think it was like 30 to 170 percent more engaged yeah on that like could there be any kind of correlation to that in an actual like physical political movement or going out and making a certain political action, or are those hard to distinguish?
Lauren:
[32:30] This is a really big question and I think a big limitation of the work so far.
Lauren:
[32:37] And, you know, in designing these studies, like, we really agonize over, you know, how realistic can we make the outcomes that we measure? The first priority is not to put people in danger. And so I think, you know, we have to say, I don't know. Like the reasons that you might think that this would correlate with actual behavior are things like, you know, there is some people do worry about posting stuff on social media. Like you don't know if these groups are infiltrated. I mean, we felt confident that they weren't. But, you know, as a average person in Zimbabwe, like your assumption is that everything is infiltrated.
Lauren:
[33:19] And in other work, I've also, you know, what we say is like validated kind of survey based or speech based measures of dissent with like very small behavioral things. Like in one of my first projects, we, as one of our outcomes, offered people a wristband where we said, this will show your political beliefs. Actually, it didn't really, right? Like it was kind of designed to not really reveal that, you know, people supported one thing or the other. Um, but those are kind of some of the reasons that, and, and those things correlate, right? This kind of small behavioral, um, measure, and then a bunch of survey based measures of, you know, how likely are you to engage in protest or something like that? Um, but it's an open question. Yeah.
Brent:
[34:09] And when you saw like anger and grievances mobilize people to get more involved, what about like fear and the use of fear from an authoritarian government to kind of suppress the population? Does it work or does it just cause them to get more emboldened?
Lauren:
[34:26] Yeah. So fear, I think, definitely works. And yeah, I think it works. And I think it's a really big part of how repression generally works. And some of the other research that I didn't send you guys to, you know, look at is testing kind of exactly that. Like, you know, how much does the emotion itself of fear seem to affect people?
Lauren:
[34:53] Um so you know thinking about when it works right the big question is like well why why are people fearful in some situations and angry in others and you know is it context is it individual level differences that explain this um and um i mean i i think it's a bit of both right um like that thing around credibility that i was saying like i think that so in um you know psychological there's this theory in psych called cognitive appraisal theory. And the argument is basically that, you know, the emotional reactions we have to different situations are largely a function of like our appraisals or beliefs about those situations. And some of them are, you know, is, do I have control over this situation, right? So if you are, like, when I've talked to activists in Zimbabwe, you know, they'll often say like, well, yeah, you know, I know that this protest might be faced with, you know, police action, but like, I know how to handle that. Like I, you know, I know what to do. I'll leave. I've seen it before. You know, they appraise that they can handle or have control over that situation. And, you know, those people, I think, are much less likely to react to the threat of repression with fear and more likely.
Lauren:
[36:14] Um, so yeah, and I basically, I think individual level differences, which of course are like a function of, you know, their experiences, maybe some innate difference that we'll never actually be able to parse out. Um, right. These, these do contribute as do like the more contextual, um, you know, questions of like, is it a moment of uncertainty? Is this a credible messenger? Right. Um, all of those matter.
Brent:
[36:38] Do you think that moment of uncertainty actually allows for the populace to feel like they're in more control because they have the opportunity to actually affect the change that they're seeking?
Lauren:
[36:47] I think it does. Yeah. Yeah, I think it does. I think, you know, I mean, we see this in the U.S. too, right? Some people are very apathetic about politics and they just think like, why bother? Um but uh and i think that you know if you've lived under the same uh government for uh you know 38 years it's very reasonable to think that yeah but um yeah when you do see things open up um i think it's a reason to think that your your personal actions might have more consequence.
Keller:
[37:22] Definitely and how can these studies on cognition be implemented into more formal political science.
Lauren:
[37:28] Models of.
Keller:
[37:29] Descent to better understand the different driving factors behind these movements and kind of better predict future outcomes.
Lauren:
[37:36] Yes um that's another great question so so when you say formal models you mean like broader theories or like mathematical models of.
Keller:
[37:49] More so the broader theory.
Lauren:
[37:51] I mean if.
Keller:
[37:51] There is an option way to do it with mathematical.
Lauren:
[37:53] That'd be interesting um so there so there is i'm not very good at game theory um just like yeah kind of how we like you know make mathematical models of human behavior in the social sciences um but um i have worked with some really smart co-authors who um where we've we've actually published a paper that kind of models the effect of fear on risk aversion and on um like your perception of risks um so that can be done um i think what interests me a little bit more at this point is trying to understand um yeah like how this can be woven into a an explanation of like the past you know, plus 40 plus years of zimbabwe's history um and um and so that's that's actually what i'm currently working on with um uh like my my long-term mentor from in zimbabwe um this professor and um kind of someone who i've worked with on a lot of these data collection projects, um and i think the big question is you know how do like how does the ruling party try to manipulate fear? And, you know, at what point does that stop working?
Lauren:
[39:11] And, yeah, and I think it's often, you know, they try to use fear and violence more generally at moments where they feel like they're out of other options. So, you know, it's not every election in Zimbabwe where violence is the clear strategy that the ruling party is using like in some elections they clearly seem to be trying to pull it back right because it's costly um it has international costs it has domestic costs people don't like when their party uses violence in general um and um and and it's also risky for them right because of this like hard to predict uh uh split between you know sometimes it induces anger that mobilizes people and sometimes it induces fear that effectively demobilizes them from the perspective of the you know ruling party or incumbent party um and so i think that's how it can be incorporated into a you know broader theory right like these emotional effects create risk from the perspective of um you know an autocrat who's thinking about using violence they make them want to avoid it um and what we argue in the book is that this then you know the fact that they're trying to avoid it um then has consequences for kind of how and when and where they use.
Brent:
[40:32] It yeah yeah i think we've talked a good amount about like different influences on people and like how that results in different actions how does like like do men and women participate in these political restrictive environments differently.
Lauren:
[40:47] Yeah and, So in the book, one of the things that we talk about is, yeah, these individual differences. Yeah, it's not every man, every woman, right? But women and people who have lower socioeconomic status, so people who are more economically vulnerable, tend to be more risk averse and tend to be lower on something called general self-efficacy, which is like basically a measure of like, how much do you in general believe that you can do? control, you know, your life. And so that's something that has a pretty strong effect on predicting whether you react to something with fear or with anger, right, a negative situation. And so, you know, we think this doesn't explain all of the difference between women and men in terms of, you know, willingness to engage in protest or support for the opposition, but we think it explains some of it, right, these kind of psychological differences um in uh yeah in risk aversion and general self-efficacy that make people more likely to react with fear um to repression yeah yeah.
Keller:
[41:55] Generally speaking of within the realm of politics the difference from the paper was that like men and women voted in similar rates but it was more the actual political movement like you said like the protest or the collective action that isn't tied directly to voting, were they kind of separated?
Lauren:
[42:13] Yes. So, yeah. So, zooming out of Zimbabwe. Yeah. So, yeah, one of the other research projects that I'm currently working on is about women's political participation in, yeah, kind of, imperfect democracies or, you know, those kind of competitive authoritarian regimes that we were talking about before. And, yeah, when you look at the global data, women and men often vote at similar rates, like you said. But women are often less likely, not always, but often less likely to say, reach out to local elites in order to, you know, ask for help with service delivery or make a complaint. And often those are the ways that things actually get done, right? If like democracy, if elections are imperfect, you know, say, yeah, you're in Zimbabwe or Uganda or a place where Like there's a strong central ruling party that, you know, there's not a lot of competition. Like the way you can actually get something is by, yeah, through these informal channels. And so, yeah, that's an area where across many different contexts you see, you know, yeah, sizable differences between women and men when you look at survey data.
Keller:
[43:27] And what are some of the main ways to kind of break through those barriers to make people believe that they have political advocacy, that they can advocate for themselves and they can, you know, actually drive change?
Lauren:
[43:39] Yeah. So... So the thing that's really hard about trying to, you know, encourage people to participate in politics is that they often have good reasons not to, right?
Lauren:
[43:55] And, you know, in the case of women's political participation, you can imagine a bunch of reasons, you know, in kind of hybrid regimes or imperfect democracies. You know, they may think that the system is rigged, right? So that's a good reason. There are also structural things like, you know, they may not have the money to participate in politics or the time, or maybe they are in households where, you know, a mother-in-law or a husband or a brother, like, don't want them to participate in politics because, you know, they think it's inappropriate or it's going to take away time from chores. So, you know, without minimizing those real structural risks, what we wanted to test in this ongoing, real structural barriers, I should say, what we wanted to test in this ongoing research project is whether conditional on structural things being, I want to say an inappropriate word, but bad. Let's say bad uh restrictive um uh like can a kind of psychosocial group-based intervention that gives that gives some hope you know makes people kind of see more um see themselves as more efficacious and see their group as more efficacious can that mobilize people um and um yeah i'm happy to talk about what we found but i don't know if you have other questions about like the theory part or um like how.
Keller:
[45:18] We hop into the findings yeah.
Lauren:
[45:19] Okay so yeah so we tested this so this is an intervention where we worked with um uh like civil society groups or in some cases international ngos and they organized groups of women um in uh vietnam kyrgyzstan malawi nigeria and pakistan um so five very different contexts um but all places where women's political participation especially in those informal channels is lower than men's um and in these groups um half of the groups were just kind of left alone they were given some information and left alone and the other half um went through a series of um i think four sessions was the lowest and some did you know more uh like.
Lauren:
[46:06] Um, where, uh, through these facilitated sessions, they did like, you know, kind of team building type exercises, um, that were designed to help them identify common problems, um, that, that they were facing as women and reinforce that like these were shared things and that these are political questions, right? Not just like, oh, I have to spend too much time getting water, right? But oh, we have to spend too much time getting water. And that's an actual thing that politics can solve for us. So that was kind of part of it. And also giving them lots of examples of ways that through group-based action, people like them had been able to get better public services. So that was the study with these, you know, a control group that just got some information about how to participate in politics and what we call a treatment group or a group that did get this intervention that was carried out by civil society or international NGOs.
Lauren:
[47:08] Okay, so what did we find? So we generally found that this group-based, more psychosocial intervention, even in places where there are a lot of structural barriers, can actually work. It didn't work everywhere, but it seems to have worked in most of the cases. And I would say it especially seems to have worked in cases where the intervention itself was done in a way that was kind of well done. I would say that. Sometimes it's hard to get an intervention like this to happen. And there's problems with staffing and all kinds of things like that. So especially in places where it was well implemented, it did increase women's political participation across, you know, across both survey measures and also it increased their participation in terms of their behavior. And I can talk about how we measured that. And it also seems to have made that participation higher quality. So it made it much more group based where they weren't just saying, hey, like, can you help me get a water point close to my house? But can you help us? And and more informed as well.
Keller:
[48:30] Did you see like an increase in reciprocity from the elites or from the government when they were mobilizing as a group and actually listening to those demands?
Lauren:
[48:41] Yeah. So we did in some cases. And yeah, and that was very promising because in some of the past studies that we were building on, you could see that, you know, efforts like this had mobilized people, not necessarily women, but people who had been marginalized from politics. And then they were met with like a kind of brick wall and they demobilized. But at least in the period of the study where we were measuring this, we don't see similar dynamics.
Brent:
[49:10] Yeah. And then I imagine it'd be like really tough to go in and like perform this research, especially within governments that maybe don't want women to participate or don't want groups to mobilize. How do you kind of approach like researching and like intervening in pretty sensitive areas?
Lauren:
[49:28] So this project, this was an enormous project. I think it took us, I want to say, five years to actually implement it. And there is something like 25 different researchers who are working on this, not to mention the professional staff who do the intervention. Um and you know for something like this it's really important that it's done in ways that are in line with the kind of local norms right you're trying to like change something in the situation but not so far that there's backlash um and um and so in this case you know we for one focused on um on countries where there's you know at least some responsiveness right.
Lauren:
[50:15] Um like i would not have felt comfortable doing this in zimbabwe right um uh at least not at the moment um and um and we also focused on uh local public services uh you know instead of say like control of the executive right um so and even the choice um to focus on women um was in part because you know i think uh women can sometimes be perceived as less threatening right um so um you know on the one hand yeah there are all of these like norms around women not participating in politics but um on the other hand when a bunch of women get together and say look like we just want to you know better water services or like we want um you know better care for children in a clinic it it seems um it can't seem innocuous um and so those are some of the things that we kind of took into mind or took into account but you know even planning for all of that like designing this in a way that was you know designed to be careful and not create backlash we still also were very careful to measure like both during the implementation and at the end whether there were any negative consequences and I think that's something that's really important and that's something that, you know, maybe we'll talk a bit more about.
Lauren:
[51:38] Like, it's not a standard practice, I would say, in the social sciences to measure not only the practices that you hope, or sorry, not only the outcomes that you hope to change, but also like some things that, you know, if it goes wrong, you might also change. But I think that's really important for making sure that our research is actually having positive impact.
Keller:
[51:59] I think we'd love to kind of hop further into how do you measure those unintended consequences? And especially when you're setting it up across so many different countries that have different norms, like how in that like pre-analysis stage, how do you set these like normalized measurements to then take the data and be able to compare them equally? Yeah.
Lauren:
[52:19] So the model for this project, this was carried out through this kind of network of researchers and policymakers called the Evidence in Governance and Politics Network.
Lauren:
[52:35] And so we had this, what we call a steering committee that kind of, you know, makes sure that all of the design makes sense. And then each team or each country had a team of researchers that was responsible for that particular study. And I think very importantly, each of those teams had researchers from the local context, right, who were especially, I think, like tuned in to the kind of norms and, you know, risks and ways that something might go wrong. Um and so our like one of the ways that that you have to do this is to set up um like you know clear communication chains um and uh like clear red lines right um so like if you're not measuring something like backlash then you can't be sure that you you know can can stop like you can't you can't stop right um if you cross some kind of threshold um and you know similarly like when you're working with such a big team you need to have clear expectations for when things should be communicated up and you know like make decisions decisions need to be made um um.
Lauren:
[53:50] Together in ways that are ideally as objective as possible, right? Because, like, there's a lot of, like, chains of incentives, right? Like, as a local implementer, you just want the project to finish. As, you know, the person directly, the researcher directly working on a project, like, again, you want the data, right? But we all need checks. um and so i think you know by measuring things by setting clear red lines like that's these are some of the ways that um that that at all levels like we can check ourselves a bit more.
Brent:
[54:23] Yeah and then if you had to give a crude estimate of like people doing similar work where you're intervening and like kind of like.
Lauren:
[54:29] Yeah like.
Brent:
[54:30] Maybe like hostile or like just unknown situations.
Lauren:
[54:34] Like how.
Brent:
[54:36] Many people doing those interventions or have those like red lines in place or have like the heart out like if we hit this threshold we have to stop.
Lauren:
[54:43] Yeah yeah um unfortunately historically it hasn't been that many um it's just in the past few years i would say that political science and economics which i know the best have had a kind of reckoning with i mean i've had more of a reckoning with um with the fact that we're doing a lot of intervention-based research or even measurement right like even measurement can has big ethical implications um and we don't always think about research ethics as carefully as we think about something like sampling or you know how you write your survey questions to get good data um so that's i would say over the past five years that's starting to change um and there have been some really high profile publications you know explaining to uh you know researchers in the social sciences like look this is how you should report on ethics in your publications. Or there was a publication by an influential political scientist named Jay Lyle saying, look, register your ethical red lines. And so it's higher now than it was five or 10 years ago. But five or 10 years ago, there really was very little transparency about this. And if you can't see it, if you don't see it happening, you should assume that it's not happening, I would say.
Brent:
[56:06] Do you think any of the funding sources for like grant, right? Like people like providing the grants or like providing the funding for this research, are they gonna start mandating it soon, you think?
Lauren:
[56:15] I think so. Yeah, journals have shifted a lot. So now journals, many of them will ask you when you submit for publication, you know, How did you do this ethically? Give me your IRB protocol. That all used to be secret, you know, just because people didn't take it as seriously, I would say. So, yeah, I think funders and publishers are moving towards creating exactly the right incentives for ethical research.
Brent:
[56:43] That's good yeah.
Keller:
[56:44] I think like furthering down the ethical research we want to talk about your research in columbia or the research that is currently being planned um for columbia i guess first like what are the questions you're trying to answer that because i think that's, like a big part of the formation behind the ethics of the paper yeah um and then i'd be curious to know like beyond ethics of just kind of on the human like how do you then structure it out to be replicable across different scales across different countries so that the research the effort put into the design doesn't have to
Keller:
[57:16] be restarted every single time the actual content of the research can grow after the first paper.
Lauren:
[57:21] So wow yeah what a great question okay so um so in that project so so the the research in colombia and i should say we've already done it in colombia and in nigeria um and we're going to do this in mexico um over the next year or so So the question behind this research is basically like when researchers are asking people about their experience with violence, with political violence, is it helping people or is it hurting people? And are people participating in this kind of research freely? Or, you know, do they understand the informed consent processes that researchers go through in ways that don't adhere to the principle of informed consent, right? Um because we have these like for decades we've had um these kind of guidelines of ethical principles of um beneficence or you know do no harm make sure that you're maximizing benefits and minimizing harms um and uh and what we call respect for persons which is kind of a awkward way of saying like you know people should be free to choose to participate in in research or not um but uh.
Lauren:
[58:40] But we don't, I would say we don't really know, right? Like these, these principles were first designed and protocols were first designed, you know, mostly for research being done, you know, in the U.S. They were primarily designed for medical trials. So, you know, as we have kind of, you know, brought these out into a more global world, which, you know, I think has big benefits, we have not sufficiently asked the questions of, like, do these travel well? And so we kind of are starting with this very common practice of asking people about their experiences with political violence as a kind of like first place where you might want to know or and also might be worried about research, you know, not adhering to those ethical principles.
Lauren:
[59:35] And, yeah, and I should say, I mean, it is important to ask people about political violence, right? Like, this is how we know whether repression is happening or, you know, kind of understanding people's lived experiences is, I think, critical. Um and there's a lot of you know inherent normative value i think in letting people kind of speak um about what's happened to them um but uh yeah but on the other hand you know we don't know if this is being done in ways that say are traumatizing to people or um in ways that um yeah where they feel like you know they're say some kind of benefit depends on their participating in this research and so that's what we're trying to test in this um in this project and along the way.
Lauren:
[1:00:19] We're also working with a really multidisciplinary group of therapists and psychologists and economists and a bunch of different people, not only from within academia, survey firm leadership, to try to develop a more detailed and more contextually relevant handbook of how you should ask about political violence if you are going to do it right um because at the moment most of our guidelines come from you know again from like work with uh people in the u.s often from interviewing students about like childhood trauma that's really useful but you know does that again travel to a place like columbia um and um yeah and the guidelines are often pretty uh pretty general right like it's not there's no like how-to guide um that i think would um you know would help say like a phd student um really figure out how to how to do this in a way that um.
Brent:
[1:01:26] And then if you're asking questions about political violence to understand, like, their ability to answer in a safe manner.
Lauren:
[1:01:34] Yeah.
Brent:
[1:01:35] It's... I'm trying to think through, like, what's the... Is the goal to inform the researchers who are going to come in and try to intervene? Or is it to inform the researchers who are trying to understand a situation in a safe way? Yeah. Because I do think that by coming in and asking the question yourself, you are almost doing the similar work you're trying to figure out on how to understand how to perform it.
Lauren:
[1:02:02] Yes. Yes.
Brent:
[1:02:03] So how do you like kind of balance that if you're doing kind of what you're trying to research at the same time?
Lauren:
[1:02:09] Yes. That's very true. And I think it's one of the kind of trickiest parts of this project. And it's something that I think we will be criticized for. You know, some other, when I've presented this work in the past, sometimes people have said, well, you know, shouldn't this be like an external evaluation of whether this is working? Like you guys all kind of have a stake in this. Um, and yeah, I think we've tried to design the project where, you know, at the leadership level, um, there are people with different viewpoints. Um, and we also are using a methodology, you know, this kind of randomized controlled trial methodology that is supposed to tie the hands of the, you know, researchers who are using it. Um i think you're right that it would be better if we were kind of more of like external evaluators right um but um so far like those people without a stake in this like haven't been interested in in testing how to do it better um or whether it's you know whether we're doing it well to begin with so um maybe that research will be done later and they'll find that like there's something, you know, either they'll find results kind of similar to ours, or maybe they'll criticize us. And that would be a very valid part of that. You know research process.
Brent:
[1:03:30] Yeah either way i think it pushes it further yeah yeah that's our hope yeah yeah definitely.
Keller:
[1:03:36] And in the research that's already been conducted in columbia and nigeria like what have you guys found about people's like emotional responses to surveys related to political violence do they seem like they're structured in a way that is supportive are they are they feeling like the surveys are harmful what what is the general direction or have you guys even gotten to the point yet to make those conclusions?
Lauren:
[1:03:58] So we've started, we've analyzed the data from Nigeria and we haven't yet analyzed it from Colombia. We just finished the data collection there. In Nigeria, it's a mixed bag. Like on the one hand, most people who participate in this research in the treatment
Lauren:
[1:04:17] and control group are very happy that they participated. A really small proportion of people regret participating um you know of course even a small percentage of people who regret is not good like we should um you know try to minimize that and so in the second site in columbia we um have strengthened the um uh strengthened the consent process and things like that to to try to minimize that even more um uh but so there are some positive things um and you know they're they're reporting benefits like both to themselves um in terms of feeling like they kind of understand their experiences more and you know they're getting some kind of um like release from talking to an interviewer in a private and respectful way about this and also see the research as beneficial to their community more generally, so that's good on the negative side um.
Lauren:
[1:05:13] Clearly very upsetting to talk about violence um and you know this is culturally specific and so um well i would say yeah culturally and contextually um in nigeria um we carried out this study in a city called kaduna where there are kind of ongoing tensions between muslims and christians um and you know in that context um people reported a lot of negative emotions um during the course of the interview when they were in the treatment group and much less when they were in the control group.
Lauren:
[1:05:47] They also reported a higher fear of retribution than we felt comfortable with. So that's a very tentative finding because we asked about fear of like any kind of negative thing happening to you. So, you know, qualitatively, when we talk to people, like a lot of people said, yeah, I'm afraid something bad might happen to me. Like what they were thinking about was like, you know, their husband might be angry that they had spent 45 minutes doing this interview or, you know, not really the kind of, I don't know, like very, very high level harm that you might have in mind when you think about that question. So we're trying to measure that we measured that more precisely in colombia um and we also found lower levels just in kind of preliminary analyses in colombia um but yeah that's that's where i would say it's it's a mixed bag um like uh there we have found almost no actual retribution um when we talk to people in a follow-up um but you know worries about it are higher than uh than we feel is acceptable in that first sight.
Lauren:
[1:07:04] And although people don't regret and they say that they get a lot of benefits, there's also negative emotions. And so another thing that we've done, in the follow-on sites is try to build in more help at the end of the interview for people to kind of come back to a more neutral emotional state. Because you can end an interview being like, okay, I got to go to the next one. We're done. And frankly, that happens. It's hard for surveyors to do four, six interviews a day. They're often really pressed for time. But like one of the things that we've found is really important is, you know, that you don't just kind of check out, but that you really use the end of a difficult interview to like kind of debrief and emphasize that sharing this, you know, is empowering, right? Might help other people, that you did a hard thing, but that it's meaningful. And to give people resources, to remind them that there are resources that they can access. So those are some of the kind of preliminary things that we've found and learned.
Brent:
[1:08:15] Yeah. And then in that answer, you said a few times, I think, levels that we weren't comfortable with. And then before we talked about like, what's that red line? What's that cutoff? How do you define like, this is what i deem is like too far like what's that cut off like what's the metric you like say like this is the point at which we stop.
Lauren:
[1:08:34] So yeah this is kind of like identifying critical junctions like there's no you know universal answer to this um at the moment um and um you know i think what we advocate for is that every research project has to make public what their ethical red lines are because that allows other people to say you guys are nuts like that's you know stop right or um um, Yeah, like it should be a debate, right? And even in the Belmont Report, there's a bit of ambiguity in how to interpret beneficence, right? On the one hand, I think we would all like to think, you know, that it should be do no harm ever, right? But that's not, you know, that's not the way that kind of action in the world works.
Brent:
[1:09:28] Right?
Lauren:
[1:09:30] And so, you know, between this, like, do no harm ever and, you know, minimize harm, maximize benefits, like, there's a lot of, I would say, I would say we need more as a discipline, you know, as a society, maybe, because it shouldn't just be social scientists choosing this. Like, I think that, you know, there are other stakeholders, right? I think we do need more public debate over this and that by kind of setting some initial project specific red lines, that that should be, you know, a step towards coming up with something clearer that like ethics boards at universities or funders or could take on.
Brent:
[1:10:10] Definitely.
Keller:
[1:10:11] And with research of this nature, I mean, you sent us the papers and it was almost 60 pages of essentially like pre-research planning and structure. How, or like, what are some of the unexpected challenges that might come through? Like, even if you do spend years planning a paper and have like a very clear, if this, this, like, here's exactly what we're going to do. What might come up that when you actually go to implement this research that could just kind of derail the entire researcher make it actually harder to get to those results.
Lauren:
[1:10:39] There are so many this is like that uh yeah what is it all happy families are the same all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way right um so you know there's like each of these projects so many things has to go right for the research to be high quality credible um and um i would say some places where it, you know, often can go wrong are either in like the way that you.
Lauren:
[1:11:12] The way that you design, say, an intervention, right, it could not make sense. And I've had this happen to me. You know, sometimes you design something and like in your head or in that, you know, in your head, in your collaborator's head, in your partner's heads, like this seems like it's capturing the concept that you're trying to get at, but it's not, right, for the people who participate in it. And there are real gaps. Like even if you, you know, even in research where I'm collaborating with Professor Masoon Goury, the professor who I'm writing this book with, he is more elite. He's very educated, right? Even if you're in your own society, there are things that you may make erroneous assumptions on, right? So yeah, designing interventions, designing measures, the way that we understand questions may be very different from the way that, again, like, you know, a woman in Vietnam participating in these groups would understand them. And then just an implementation, right? Like these are like projects that are carried out by humans, again, who often have incentives to do things quickly, like they're just trying to feed their families in some cases, and that's very understandable.
Lauren:
[1:12:24] And so there's a bunch of um what we call like agency loss and these projects take really a ton of of effort um and uh um but yeah i think it's often worth it because right like you're getting credible evidence and i think also in the process of these big collaborative projects where you're working with multiple co-authors you're working with implementers of different types survey firms uh You know, often NGOs, like non-governmental agencies or civil society organizations, like this is like kind of where the rubber hits the road in terms of like, you know, this is how you understand politics. Right. So, yeah, lots of things can go wrong.
Brent:
[1:13:06] Yeah, definitely. And I know even we recorded an episode about like agricultural technology and how to properly implement that. And a huge finding there was just you need someone local to help you give the insight and guide the research. Less outsider from the West coming in. Just like, here's a solution that might not actually be viable. Yeah but overall i think we covered like a ton of really good concepts and also just like how to approach research like do you have like a general advice like moving forward just like the people out there that might be trying to go like help out yeah people who are struggling just how to actually be like effective and like understand their safety and all those things.
Lauren:
[1:13:47] So what I hear a lot from students that I know here at Davis is that they don't know where to start. And I think I would say that there is no perfect place to start, right? Like, I would recommend thinking of the first few years after you graduate as like a trial and error period where, you know, you may like, you know, try to be a kind of community organizer, right? Or, you know, maybe like a local journalist or something. You may decide that you hate it. Or you may decide, you know, like, kind of like I did that, oh, like, I don't think this industry or this kind of strategy is very effective. That's fine. You know, like, it's good to cross things off your list. And I would say the caveat to that is that, you know, you should also be sure that especially when you're going into, I mean, as basically most of us do, like if you're going into a community that is not, you know, your own, however you understand your own, that you listen very carefully to people who usually will have less power than you.
Lauren:
[1:15:00] Um, because often, you know, we want to help, um, you know, even if we kind of come from a community, if you go to college, you have a different status than maybe the people from, from the community that you came from or that you're trying to help. Right.
Lauren:
[1:15:15] And so, you know, I think no one is kind of immune from needing to be very careful about listening to, you know, whoever they're trying to work with in a collaborative way or trying to to help. If you're someone who kind of wants to reduce inequality or, you know, equalize power across rich and poor parts of the world or rich and
Lauren:
[1:15:34] poor parts of, you know, the country or whatever it is. Um, so yeah, I would say those are the, and that's also, you know, again, to go back to this idea of, um, you know, transparency and ethics, like you don't know if you're causing harm if you're not listening. Right. So to be able to, um, you know, kind of have a trial and error approach, um, I think that you have to like build in checks.
Lauren:
[1:15:59] You know, to say, okay, I'm here as a volunteerist, right? I built my library. Um, like, is that helpful? how could it be more helpful right or what's another example yeah like I'm asking people questions about violence in my research is that harmful or is it actually making people feel like they're empowered and doing something good for their communities right we should always be trying to kind of check ourselves but don't let that like don't let that paralyze you as you're trying to get started, because I would say it's better to try to do something, to do it carefully, than to, you know, just say, oh, like, you know, I don't want to try to kind of like cross boundaries, right? Or, you know, everything is so messed up that it's not worth trying to like reduce inequality or something like that. Personally, I think it's worth it, but you have to be careful.
Keller:
[1:16:55] Wonderful. I think those are all really great things to think through. Thank you so much for your time.
Lauren:
[1:16:59] Thank you both. This was really fun. I hope it It was interesting.
Brent:
[1:17:02] Definitely.