More Than a vote: Building community power in the age of performative politics

As public trust in institutions declines and civic disengagement rises across demographic groups, the communicative failures driving that disengagement demand rigorous scholarly attention. This research sits at the intersection of communication theory, political science, and cultural studies, contributing to scholarship on institutional messaging, civic agency, media representation, and the relationship between narrative power and political participation. Its findings carry practical implications for how communication is taught, practiced, and redesigned across academic, civic, and political contexts.

More Than A Vote

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Promises vs. results

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Political Accountability

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More Than A Vote · Promises vs. results · Political Accountability ·

Research questions

  • Political Communications & Civic Engagement

    1. Why do politicians say all the right things to get elected and then disappear until the next election?

    2. What would it look like if politicians remained accountable throughout their term?

    3. When people stop voting or tuning into politics, is it because they are apathetic or is it because they are exhausted from a system that has never fully worked for them?

    4. How do redistricting laws impact the communities who already silenced, unseen and undervalued?

    5. Who truly benefits when people feel like their only choice is between bad and worse? How often is that story told and repeated?

    6. What would politics look like if it was actually designed to inform and empower people instead of just getting people to vote?

  • Media & Structural inequity

    1. How do the stories told by the media, by politicians, and by institutions hide the real reasons inequality keeps happening?

    2. Do civic rights organizations speak up when it matters the most, or do they only show up once the cameras are rolling?

    3. Why does the media portray Black people under a different lens than everyone else, and what does that tell us about who gets to be seen as human?

    4. When a policy fails, why do we rarely hear about it from the institutions responsible and what are they protecting by staying silent?

    5. What does it actually take for the stories and experiences of Black communities to turn into real policy change?

    6. Who has done it successfully and how can we take their process and use it to guide our current journey?

  • Medical inequity and intergenerational impact

    1. How does the pain of what our ancestors survived show up in our bodies, our minds, and our communities today?

    2. How can we have those conversations in safe, open spaces to impact change?

    3. How are we as Black people able to trust health communication if it does not accurately reflect our experience or history?

    4. What would trustworthy health communication actually look like?

    5. During the pandemic, who did public health communication leave out?

    6. Was that by design?

    7. How did underserved communities find ways to protect themselves without receiving all the necessary information?

  • criminal inequity & Public narratives

    1. Why do we build more prisons instead of creating more mental health resources?

    2. Are we numb to conversations around crime?

    3. How does the way incarceration is portrayed in the media keep a broken system running, are communities saying about it that is not making the news?

    4. How does neurodivergence diagnoses in adulthood appear in professional environments and should those environments own the burden of management responsibility?

    5. Why do so many mental health crises in Black communities end in arrest instead of care?

    6. How can effective communication around mental health change that statistic?

  • economic inequity & institutional communication

    1. How do banks, employers, and housing systems use fine print, policy language and silent procedures to maintain racial economic barriers through the lens of equity and equality?

    2. Why is there not enough conversation around the mass firing of Black women from the federal workforce?

    3. Why is there not enough conversation around the drawbacks of at will employment in the United States?

    4. Why was this not deemed newsworthy?

    5. What does that silence say about whose economic struggles matter more?

    6. Black women are creating villages and holding up households across this country, sometimes alone, so why are we excluded from economic systems and institutional conversation?

    7. How can we increase communication to drive the change we need?