Research + Synthesis

I had an overwhelming amount to learn about politics. At the start of the summer of 2018, I knew that I needed to begin both anywhere and everywhere. As someone who loves used book stores, they seemed like a great place to start.

I discovered a number of podcasts that orbit or land on issues of polarization. My favorites include The Ezra Klein Show (engaging interviews with authors, thinkers, and researchers in current politics), Political Research Digest (breakdowns of fascinating current empirical studies in politics), and Conversations with People Who Hate Me (Webby Award-winning podcast hosted by Dylan Marron).

I learned about Make America Dinner Again in the fall from one of my interviewees and quickly reached out to get involved. Make America Dinner Again, or MADA, helps people across the country organize and host dinner parties that center on facilitated discussions of political issues. Tria Chang and Justine Lee, the founders and coordinators of this national organization, kindly welcomed me in and gave me resources, especially their list of interested participants in the New York City area. This was incredibly helpful in putting together my first co-creation workshop, discussed in Chapter 6. I reference MADA frequently throughout this book as indicative of both the successes and the shortcomings of groups currently working to address polarization. Overall, it has been a wonderful group to be a part of and I look forward to continuing my particpation well beyond this thesis.

Throughout my thesis, I conducted more than fifty interviews with subject-matter experts whose life and work are affected by polarization. While many of these interviews were intended as subject-matter expert interviews, the line was often blurred; it was difficult for interviewees to separate their work with teams and/ or politics from their own experiences with social and political polarization in America. For the most part, I chose to eliminate the distinction in order to (1) gather as many stories as possible along with individual expertise and (2) reduce the number of judgments I would need to make about whether information was coming from a place of expertise, a place of lived experience, or both.

Synthesizing fifty interviews conducted over the course of four weeks was no small task. There was a lot of data to unpack, and it seemed like there was no simple way to do it. To start, I bought 2,400 post-it notes from Staples. I then spent too long thinking about how to approach the challenge. After two days of starting and stopping the process, I realized that the best course of action was action and decided to commit to the method of printing all of my interview notes, slicing them into chunks of information, and then grouping them on a large floor mat.

Because the category of “people” in the initial affinity map was the largest and contained breadcrumbs that I wanted to follow, I took time to deconstruct it further into each of the four sections I had identified earlier: self, interpersonal, communal, and contextual. Within each of these sections, I did more grouping and extracted four to seven insights per category, shown on the next two pages. Each insight offers opportunities for intervention.