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My name is Kristin ("Krissy"), and I'm an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina. My research adopts a political psychology framework to explore rural-urban differences in political behavior and public health, as well as vaccine and health-related misinformation and attitudes. 

 

One stream of research investigates rurality as an identity in contemporary politics: how perceiving one's sense of self as being tied to rurality, and how this relates to populist attitudes, immigration, democratic norms, affective polarization, and attitudes toward government. I'm currently working on a book project about rural identity where I argue that contemporary academic conceptualizations of rural attitudes are overly defined by the decline of the white working class. This overemphasis paints rural residents as only being driven by negative emotions towards out-groups, while mischaracterizing many groups in rural America and essentially ignoring non-whites and people of different socio-economic classes. Instead, I aim to help create a wider understanding of rural attitudes in politics that hinges on in-group values and concerns via a rural social identity.

 

In addition, I have published research on health policy attitudes and false information, particularly relating to vaccines. I will be continuing my work in this vein through a number of projects. In one of these projects, my co-investigators and I examine the effectiveness of government messaging on vaccines during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This project is funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Science of Science: Discovery, Communication, and Impact grant.

 

I'm also working on two additional book projects with co-author teams. The first, under contract with Cambridge University Press, investigates the role of trust in science and its relationship with political behavior before and throughout the pandemic, primarily relying on a large multi-wave survey data set of American adults. The second book project uses interpretive methods and interviews to examine in-depth how an unexpected life event - becoming a parent of a child with Down Syndrome - leads to identity formation, increased political awareness, and political action through forced interactions with street-level bureaucrats and Down Syndrome associations on behalf of someone else.

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You can find my published work in academic journals such as Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Geography, Political Science Research and Methods, Political Research Quarterly, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, Social Science & Medicine, JAMA Network Open, and the Journal of Rural Health, among others. My research has won the Best Paper in the Health Politics and Policy section of APSA (and an honorable mention in another year), as well as the best article award at the International Journal of Public Opinion Research and at the Journal of Rural Health.

 

My work has also been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, Newsweek, Forbes, The Atlantic, Time, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Politico, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEightJohn Oliver's 'Last Week Tonight', and more. In addition, I've written journalistic pieces and op-eds that have appeared in various outlets, including Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report. In addition, I have also given several invited talks about my research at institutions such as University of California Los Angeles, the University of Toronto, Claremont Graduate University, and more.

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Further, I am active in multiple professional organizations. I'm currently the Secretary of the Health Politics and Policy Section of APSA as well as a standing council member of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences. I have also served as an expert consultant for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

 

Formerly, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, and at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. I was also an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University. Before that, I was a full-time Visiting Instructor of Political Science at Carleton College while completing my PhD in Political Science with a minor in political psychology at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. 

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