New & Noteworthy

This week’s Clippings includes: Zeynep Tufekci comments on the Trump administration’s NIH funding cuts, warning they endanger America’s biomedical research infrastructure. Elizabeth Bruch and Amie Gordon launched Revel, a University of Michigan dating app that doubles as a research tool to study relationship dynamics. Meanwhile, Ruby Lai examined Hong Kong’s subdivided flats, Musa Al-Gharbi commented on corporate responses to anti-D.E.I. efforts, and scholars mourn the passing of Michael Burawoy.

Accents are Seen and Heard by Eleanor Nickel writes up work by Ethan Kutlu, who found that visual racial cues influence how listeners perceive accentedness, with participants more likely to rate speech as accented when shown an image of a South Asian woman, regardless of the actual accent. This research highlights how racial biases shape not just visual judgments but also auditory perception.

From the Archives

As of February 11th, 2025, 27 religious groups are suing the Trump administration over mandates allowing ICE agents into sensitive locations like places of worship. This 2018 Contexts piece by Genesis Torres and Kim Ebert highlights how institutions manage immigration control, claiming increased security while immigrants face extreme threats.

On January 8th, thousands protested in Union Square against Trump’s order to withhold federal funding from hospitals providing gender-affirming care. A similar protest in 2017 opposed his policies on women, immigrants, and marginalized groups. Read this 2017 piece by Jacqui Frost to explore how gender shapes protest and the vital roles activists play in social movements.

Last week, Pope Francis condemned Trump’s mass deportation plans, citing biblical calls to “welcome the stranger” and opposing JD Vance’s use of Catholic theology. This 2015 piece by Jack Delehanty explores divisions in the U.S. Catholic Church on social justice.

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Contexts

• michael burawoy: an absolute gem by Marcel Paret honors Michael Burawoy, a groundbreaking Marxist sociologist and passionate advocate for social justice, passed away early this February, leaving behind a legacy of transformative scholarship and mentorship.
• 23 and we? by Parker Muzzerall write up research by Amina Zarrugh and Luis Romero, who studied 568 YouTube videos to see how genetic ancestry tests affect people’s ideas about race. They found that many test users define race by DNA percentages instead of culture or history, which may bring back traditional ideas about race based on bloodlines.

Council on Contemporary Families

• How Incarceration Exposure Affected Pregnant Women During the COVID-19 Pandemic, by Alexander Testa and colleagues, used data from the 2020 PRAMS survey and found that women with incarceration exposure experienced nearly twice as many pandemic-related stressors as their peers, including food insecurity, homelessness, and domestic violence.

Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

• Revisited Realities of Nuclear Violence in Silent Fallout: Baby Teeth Speak by Sarah Humiko Lam on the 1960s, the Baby Tooth Survey measuring exposed radioactive contamination in children, leading to the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty.