Several Elon University faculty members have received awards from the Turnage Fund for Political Communication to further their research on political communication and media literacy.
The Turnage Family Innovation and Creativity Fund for the Study of Political Communication has granted awards to several Elon University faculty members to support their research on political communication and media literacy in the 21st century. This year’s recipients approach relevant issues to the Fund’s mission from local, national, and global perspectives.
The recipients of the Turnage Fund will present their work on campus during the 2024-25 academic year.
Enrique Armijo
Enrique Armijo, professor in the School of Law, is pursuing a research project titled “Counter‐lies: Disinformation and the Marketplace of Ideas.” According to Armijo, “participants in knowledge production environments are often not motivated by accuracy.”
His project “offers a novel but needed corrective to First Amendment theory by taking a social epistemology approach to considering actors’ motivations in the knowledge production system and introduces and theorizes the concept of counter‐lies: disinformation concerning verifiable facts that is shared with the intent to deceive one into believing their mistaken beliefs are true.”
Armijo will use the Turnage Funds to present his work at professional venues and produce public-facing writing for general audiences.
Jane O’Boyle
Jane O’Boyle, associate professor of strategic communications, received support for her project “Gen Z, Media Literacy and Elections: Two studies about news consumption and first-time voters.” O’Boyle says her project’s goal is “to teach students how important it is for a democracy to have citizen engagement and ethical news media that reaches them.”
Noting a distrust in news media and politics, she will collect national data about Gen Z’s use of news media and also develop “pedagogical tools that will make a difference in students’ learning and engagement on these topics.”
J. Israel Balderas and Jill Auditori
The trio of J. Israel Balderas, assistant professor of journalism, Jill Auditori, lecturer in political science and public policy and Matthew Blomberg, assistant professor of journalism at Temple University Japan, will have the Turnage Fund support their collaborative project “The N.C. Coalición por la Precisión: Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Targeting North Carolina’s Latino Communities in the 2024 Election.”
Balderas, Auditori and Blomberg are working with the Latino community through Alamance Community College, and with the support of resources from Factchequeado, a pioneering Spanish-language fact-checking organization in their project. Among the objectives of this project are analyzing “how political actors communicate to Latino constituencies in a fraught media environment” and equipping “Latino voters with media literacy skills to determine information accuracy.” The researchers will use the Turnage Funds for data collection and dissemination of their research.
The Turnage Family Faculty Innovation and Creativity Fund for the Study of Political Communication was established with generous contributions by Dave Turnage to facilitate the study of political communication and media literacy in the 21st century. Baris Kesgin, associate professor of political science and public policy, is the director of the Turnage Fund.