By Gabrielle Lewis

In 2020, Cynthia Baur encountered several students and faculty members at the University of Maryland who were concerned and confused about the legitimacy of information regarding major events, such as the pandemic and racial justice protests. 

Baur worried about people feeling so unsure about what information they could trust, so she set out to start a series of teach-ins through the Herschel S. Horowitz Center for Health Literacy where students and faculty alike can process landmarks of 2020 together.

“Obviously, misinformation and disinformation has been a huge topic of conversation all during 2020 and 2021,” Baur said. “I thought it was important to offer people a space … where people could gather and try and process this, given that we’ve all been physically separated, and it’s been hard to have some of our normal interactions since the pandemic started.”

Baur, the director for the Horowitz Center, chose to center these teach-ins around three broad topics: the pandemic, racial justice protests and the 2020 elections. She said these issues seemed to be the biggest ones where people were concerned about information legitimacy and possible misinformation.

The teach-in series, which began on Feb. 26, are held biweekly on Fridays. The most recent one on March 26 focused on information surrounding racial justice protests, as well as sociological approaches to understanding why people attend these protests.

Rod Martinez, a doctoral student of sociology, opened up the discussion by explaining sociologists’ understanding of social movements, starting with philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Martinez said their work argued that capitalism creates a false consciousness among workers that stopped them from mobilizing under certain conditions. 

“You needed to have a consciousness that you were being exploited,” Martinez said during the teach-in. “You needed to recognize that was not right. You needed to acknowledge that there was an injustice happening.”

After breaking out of this false consciousness, workers would also need to have specific grievances they could address to those in authority, Martinez said. These ideas set the foundation for a lot of the theories and research sociologists use to understand social movements.

Among those theories include strain theories which say that certain “strains” upon an individual’s experience, such as racial injustice, may be a reason why they choose to participate in protests, Martinez said. He also mentioned the research mobilization theory which says social movements depend on the number of resources available, such as people, time and money.

However, these paradigms face criticism because they focus on protests overall, not protests specifically by people of color who may face other obstacles and further repression, Martinez said.

Martinez also touched on how sociologists have been investigating the differences between the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, which was more stigmatized than the second wave that started last summer. He said “people from all walks of life” are now mobilizing, likely for a number of reasons, such as having more time to process the movement and pay attention to it.

Martinez mentioned that one of the primary ways of studying social movements is through analyzing newspaper entries about them. The conversation turned to how possible biases in journalism affect how the public understands social movements.

Dushanka Kleinman, an epidemiology and biostatistics professor, said she uses a mix of media, literature and historical readings to understand important events.

“Someone once said the newspaper coverage is the first edition of history,” she said. “Time is needed to critically understand the event or topic.”

Jayme Savoy, a junior English major, said she often looks at social media, though the landscape is now oversaturated with heavy events, and the toxicity and negativity associated with them can affect mental health.

This teach-in was the first one Savoy attended. She wanted to learn about what other people thought about the topic and learn more about 2020’s racial justice protests in general.

“I got this perspective that a lot of people, old and young, are just really eager to learn more about the issue,” Savoy said. “[It] makes me glad to know that there are so many people who are educating themselves and not just using the news or just using one single source to get all their information.”

Baur said she hopes these teach-ins help people feel more confident in the reflection they have done on the series’ topics and that they are less uncertain about how to find verifiable information they can trust.

“At the center … that’s a big part of our mission is trying to help people feel confident in the information that they find and use for decision-making,” Baur said. “Hopefully they get a sense of community that there are other people reflecting on and trying to process these issues in a more collective way.”

Featured photo: Screenshot of Zoom meeting. Gabrielle Lewis/Stories Beneath the Shell