Meaning & Measurement Mini-Conference
Andrew J Perrin - U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
andrew_perrin@unc.eduI am an assistant professor at UNC Chapel Hill. I am interested in
political culture and ideology, and specifically in how people mobilize
styles and taken-for-granted modes of thought to construct arguments for
(and against) political positions. That is, I am working on how people
operate within constrained discursive "spaces" to build generative
deliberation.
That set of interests requires considering both the strategies people use
to enact deliberation and the structures that constrain the discursive
spaces. In earlier research I used focus groups heavily to replicate
group deliberation. I have become interested, more recently, in "mediated
public spheres": deliberation in, e.g., letters to the editor, call-in
radio, and Internet chat. I have a couple of current projects involving
letters to the editor as a form of deliberative discourse.