Sarah Shugars (they/them/theirs) studies how everyday people talk about, engage with, and collectively shape the modern world around them. Bringing together computational communication and the principles of deliberative democracy, they develop new text and network methods in order to examine the relational nature of public life, the linguistic modes through which people express themselves, and the technological affordances which shape digital discourse. They are a first-generation to college student and are deeply committed to increasing access and equity in higher education.
Shugars’ research focuses on political communication, social media, and computational communication. The platforms, data, and methods of our modern computational world have fundamentally reshaped not only the ways in which citizens engage with their societies, but also the ways in which researchers can study such political behavior. Their work blends methodological approaches to richly examine political life in the digital world. Motivating questions of their research include:
- What are the dynamics, effects, and implications of online political conversations?
- What factors shape individual’s media and information environments?
- How can we better measure the ways in which people articulate their political beliefs and justify their conflicting beliefs to others?