Civic Studies » Sarah Shugars

Blog Post Title

Sarah Shugars — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 16:25:28 +0000

What goes into a blog post? Helpful, industry-specific content that: 1) gives readers a useful takeaway, and 2) shows you’re an industry expert. Use your company’s blog posts to opine on current industry topics, humanize your company, and show how your products and services can help people.

The post Blog Post Title appeared first on Dr. Sarah Shugars.

Continue reading →

The ego of public life, part III

Sarah Shugars — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 22:09:14 +0000

In July of 2013, I started writing publicly every (work) day. Then, after four and a half years, in November 2017, I stopped. There are a lot of reasons why I started writing -- and a lot of reasons why I let the habit go. Continue reading →

Reflecting on Service

Sarah Shugars — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 14:54:09 +0000

I was very honored to receive Northeastern’s Outstanding Graduate Student Award in the area of community service. As part of that award, I was asked to write a statement of my personal philosophy regarding service. To be honest, I found the prompt challenging as I don’t really consider most of my efforts “service” in the […] Continue reading →

The Cost of Visibility

Sarah Shugars — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 23:27:18 +0000

Listening to an interview yesterday with Susan Striker, Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and author of the (recently updated) book Transgender History, I was struck by the core of her argument: Transgender people have always been around, it’s just that now they are more visible than they used to be. And they are visible […] Continue reading →

Polls and Partisanship

Sarah Shugars — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 22:38:49 +0000

A recent poll found that 37% of evangelicals are more likely to vote for GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore following allegations of sexual misconduct against him. That makes for a nice clickbait headline. It sounds appalling, and it is appalling, though perhaps not for the reasons one might think. First, some details on the poll itself: it was […] Continue reading →

Polarization, heuristics, and the 24 hour news cycle

Sarah Shugars — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 16:33:12 +0000

Skeptics of the democratic ideal of self governance often point to the almost laughable impracticality of the vision. People are simply bad at being knowledgeable and making well-informed judgements. Notably, this concern needn’t inherently be a slight. While the most elitist of skeptics will judgmentally decry the dreadful specter of “the masses” for perceived failings […] Continue reading →

Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies

Sarah Shugars — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 20:32:05 +0000

I recently read Chenhao Tan et al’s 2016 WWW paper Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions, which presents an interesting study of the linguistic features of persuasion. Coming from a deliberative background, the word ‘persuasion’ has negative connotations. Indeed, Habermas and others strongly argue that deliberation must be free from persuasion – […] Continue reading →

Text as Data Conference

Sarah Shugars — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 20:41:08 +0000

At the end of last week, I had the pleasure of attending the eighth annual conference on New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data, hosted by Princeton University and organized by Will Lowe, John Londregan, Marc Ratkovic, and Brandon Stewart. The conference had a truly excellent program, and was packed with great content on a wide […] Continue reading →

Me Too

Sarah Shugars — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 19:56:17 +0000

I woke up this morning to a flood a #MeToo comments, as women from all spectra of my life stepped forward to share their personal stories of sexual abuse and harassment; stories of being silenced, of not being believed, of being told it was their fault, of normalizing the incessant stream of misogyny. It’s a […] Continue reading →

On Soap and Apologies

Sarah Shugars — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 20:00:25 +0000

This weekend, Dove soap was forced to pull a Facebook ad which appeared to show a black woman miraculously turning into a white woman as a result, presumably, of the purifying power of their soap. The full narrative here is, of course, complicated. As Lola Ogunyemi, the black model featured at the top of the […] Continue reading →