In the News: Shana Kushner Gadarian

“There are just so many things that have happened in the last six months in this presidential administration that to think that we know what the issues will be in 2028 and who the players will be—I think it's just asking too much,” says Shana Gadarian, Merle Goldberg Fabian Professor of Excellence in Citizenship and Critical Thinking.

Supported with a generous gift from Maxwell Advisory Board member David Kelso, Brittany L. Kmush and Shana Kushner Gadarian hope to better understand how state policies influence vaccine decisions.

“States are supposed to be a laboratory for experimentation. What’s interesting about this moment is that [some] states are now a laboratory for what they perceive to be a hostile federal government,” says Shana Gadarian, Merle Goldberg Fabian Professor of Excellence in Citizenship and Critical Thinking.

“They have their own constituencies that they are there to represent, but also they have the ability to capture media attention and be very clear and forceful, because they don’t have to deal with Trump in the Washington policymaking arena,” says Shana Gadarian, Merle Goldberg Fabian Professor of Excellence in Citizenship and Critical Thinking.

“We’re not seeing young people go live on communes,” says Shana Gadarian, Merle Goldberg Fabian Professor of Excellence in Citizenship and Critical Thinking. “They’re working at banks, they’re starting gig economies, they’re working in high tech. If that’s not capitalism, I’m not clear what would be.”

The exhibit is drawn from a collection of images and audio files contributed to the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), which was started in May 2020 by a team of researchers from the University of Connecticut and Brown University.

Senator Booker's speech is intended to “bring attention to the threat that Booker and Democrats argue that Donald Trump poses to the health of American democracy and the welfare of the American public and be a rallying cry for other Democrats to act boldly with whatever means they have,” says Shana Gadarian, professor of political science.

The damage caused by the administration’s actions extends far beyond the professors whose studies have been halted, says Shana Gadarian, professor of political science. “This is potentially a direct harm to people who are, for example, waiting for a cure for cancer or a genetic disease,” she says.

“The executive branch is expanding its powers beyond what any other administration has tried to do,” says Shana Gadarian, Merle Goldberg Fabian Professor of Excellence in Citizenship and Critical Thinking. “That’s the crisis we’re in.”

The way the administration has framed its raids is an attempt to shape public perception by driving the narrative that “immigrants are criminals” who “don’t belong in the United States,” says Shana Gadarian, Merle Goldberg Fabian Professor of Excellence in Citizenship and Critical Thinking.

“Because there's some evolutionary benefit in groups, I think one of the ways that politicians are quite effective at making people fearful is to make them fearful of groups that are different than themselves,” says Shana Gadarian, professor of political science and associate dean for research.

“If all of a sudden HHS is now in the business of passing more regulations on the food industry, on agriculture, we might see that a Republican Senate majority and a Republican House is less interested in allocating a budget to HHS that then would be under a different leadership,“ says Shana Gadarian, professor of political science.

Professor of Political Science Shana Gadarian and co-authors conclude that polarization is a serious—if largely overlooked—determinant of health, whose impacts must be more thoroughly understood and mitigated. Published in Nature Medicine.

Hundreds of faculty, staff and alumni gathered in Syracuse to celebrate the school’s centennial and honor several accomplished individuals.

Harris reshaped the election race by “advocating for women's health, reproductive freedom and abortion access more vocally and more powerfully than Biden did and than the Trump/Vance ticket is,” says Shana Gadarian, professor of poltical science. 

“One of the things I think the split screen was able to do was to show Harris looking really composed. She was looking right at Trump and she wasn't going to let up. And I think part of the strategy wasn't really about him at all. It was about ‘I can hold the stage. I can be presidential. I can be commander in chief,’” says Shana Gadarian, professor of political science.

Shana Gadarian, professor of political science, notes that while rising temperatures may not shape vote choice directly in the United States this year, they will likely increase the salience of climate as an issue. “This will especially be the case for candidates on the left, where voters name the environment and climate as issues they care about,” she says.

“They [delegates] themselves are part of the party apparatus,“ says Shana Gadarian, professor of political science. “As with everything in politics in the United States, everything comes from the states. Occasionally you see a delegate make an individual decision and decide to vote for somebody else but that's pretty rare.”