Community-engaged research often raises questions about who benefits from academic work and how knowledge moves between universities and the people most affected by the issues being studied. In his research and film projects, Kirk French, an assistant professor of anthropology and of film production and media studies at Penn State, works with communities as collaborators rather than subjects, shaping research questions, methods and outcomes alongside local partners.
Q&A: How researchers and communities build mutually beneficial work
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Fake news generated by AI is often perceived as more credible than texts written by humans. That worries linguist Silje Susanne Alvestad. In 2017, “fake news” was chosen as the new word of the year [...]
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Messages intended to suppress votes can be precisely delivered to particularly vulnerable and consequential groups of people via social media and keep millions of them from casting ballots, according to a new study that is [...]
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Bureaucratic hurdles and racial disparities restrict access to victim compensation for adult survivors of sexual assault, deepen justice system inequities and compound trauma. The absence of police verification of a crime is the primary reason [...]
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A vast majority of professional athletes believe they should be allowed to engage in political activism and intend to use their social media channels to raise awareness about racial injustice, according to a report issued [...]
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Americans are less confident in U.S. elections than they were a year ago—Democrats, Republicans and independents alike. In a national survey from the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections (CTTE) at the University of California [...]
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A global team of researchers, including Professor Stephen Reicher from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews, have produced a new World Bank Working Paper offering an innovative and integrative [...]
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A new study published in Nature has found that X’s algorithm—the hidden system or “recipe” that governs which posts appear in your feed and in which order—shifts users’ political opinions in a more conservative direction.This [...]
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Certain markers of high status may more strongly boost attitudes toward women versus men, and low status markers may more strongly worsen attitudes toward men versus women—with both findings more pronounced in countries with more [...]
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While there are plenty of historical topics U.S. citizens agree on—generally, events and figures from the Civil War up to the end of the Cold War—the birth of the nation isn’t one of them, according [...]
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Thousands of people were killed by Iranian security forces in days of protests in January 2026. Meanwhile, in the same month, the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis shone a light on the use of [...]
