John Carlson

Co-Director, Recovering Truth Project
Director, Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict
Associate Professor of Religious Studies, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies

Tracy Fessenden

Co-Director, Recovering Truth Project
Director of Strategic Initiatives, Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict
Steve and Margaret Forster Professor of Religious Studies, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies

Gaymon Bennett

Assistant Director of Research, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
Associate Professor of Religion, Science, and Technology, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies

Kristin Gilger

Reynolds Professor in Business Journalism, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Athena Aktipis

Associate Professor, Department of Psychology
Director, Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative

Project
There are two primary areas of my work and service that resonate greatly with the Fellowship opportunity. The first is my interest in the idea of “fake news” as a phenomenon that is not just limited to journalism, but rather as a process that can manifest across many different biological and social systems. The second is my interest, broadly speaking, in different ways of knowing, and how to bring together diverse disciplines to explore important questions.

Evan Berry

Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities
School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies

Project
Environmental activists and advocates assert that the scientific facts should guide societal responses to climate change. They are not wrong, but this view of climate politics fails to consider how religious frames of reference shape the different ways that communities understand climate change and imagine their responses to it. My project examines the tensions between scientific and religious epistemologies of climate knowledge and seeks outcomes that can help change-makers navigate these different ways of thinking.

Paul Carrese

Professor and Founding Director
School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Project
As late as the 1960s a broad consensus existed in America that basic truths about justice undergirded the American political experiment; Martin Luther King, Jr. invoked the Declaration and Constitution in the 1963 “I Have A Dream” address, affirming self-evident truths about human nature and human affairs.  Academia has led the way in repudiating such “essentialism” and other modern, and pre-modern, ideas about human affairs; largely voices from the left, some from the right.  Will the obvious costs of such repudiation now support renewal of ideas about Socratic argumentation as shared pursuit of truth, and renewal of an intellectual principle of moderation or avoiding extremes and single-mindedness, thus appreciating the complexity of truth and truth-seeking?  Will these costs support renewal of the civic analogue of such truth-seeking – the civil disagreement and civic friendship that sustains reasonable argumentation about public affairs, along with shared commitment to the spirit animating the First Amendment, of robust inquiry and reasonable debate across philosophical views, interests, institutions?

Julio Cisneros

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Professor of Practice in Health News
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Project
I want to explore the extent to which society, the media, religious institutions, and governments mold our perceptions of reality. Does an ultimate universal truth exist, be it in the realm of science or at the more mundane human level?  Excess of information, social influence (individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people,) fake news, social media, subliminal messages in movies, TV commercials, music, culture, art, and other factors, such as economic status or political views, affect people’s opinions or perspectives or reality.

Syed Hussain

Assistant Professor
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Project
Hussain’s research is about social influence and persuasion. His publications include the use of narratives (storytelling) to improve attitudes towards immigrants, role of moral outrage and compassion fatigue on social media, and potential of personal and national nostalgia in the context of immigration crisis on the U.S. border. Hussain is a mixed methods researcher and teaches social media engagement, and audience research & behavior courses at the Cronkite School.

Jennet Kirkpatrick

Associate Professor
School of Politics and Global Studies

Project
Common wisdom holds that politicians often lie and that their deceits harm democratic politics. My project explores if this bit of common sense is correct. It asks whether politicians in a democracy should be more concerned with truth or should act as truth-tellers. Is truth essential in some capacity to democratic politics and, if so, why? What do we give up on in democratic life when we give up on the truth? What might we gain?

Elvia Díaz

Columnist and editorial board member at the Arizona Republic. She has more than 20 years of print, radio and online journalism experience in English and Spanish. After earning a master's degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley, the Mexican native worked for the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon, and the Albuquerque Journal in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1999, she joined The Republic where she has held several reporting and editing positions. Elvia is also an adjunct professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

Charlie McCrary

Postdoctoral Researcher | 2022-2023
Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict

Scholar of American religion, focusing on secularism, religious freedom, race, and science. He is the author of Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (University of Chicago Press, 2022). In addition to his work on Recovering Truth project, he is part of the Beyond Secularization: Religion, Science, and Technology in Public Life team.

Sarah Riccardi-Swartz

Postdoctoral Researcher | 2020-2022
Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict

Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is an assistant professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Religious Studies from Missouri State University. She earned an M.Phil and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from New York University, where she also obtained an Advanced Graduate Certificate in Culture and Media (ethnographic filmmaking and theory). Her first book is Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (Fordham Press).