Franziska Wagner studied comparative political sciences at the University of Mannheim and at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Sciences Po. Her research interests lie in party politics, far-right politics, social media, and computational approaches to social sciences. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D in Political Sciences at the Central European University, where she works on party communication on social media, and the role of discourse and emotions. Franziska is a researcher at the AUTHLIB project (Neo-authoritarianisms in Europe and the liberal democratic response) that aims at exploring the varieties of neo-authoritarian, illiberal ideologies in Europe and their political implications.

You can read her piece here: https://www.authlib.eu/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2024.1390587/full

Today, I'm talking with Dr. Keri Leigh Merritt about her recent piece in Aeon Magazine, entitled "The southern gap." The piece explores the roots of economic underdevelopment in the American South, a problem that still plagues the region. From there, we talk more broadly about the politics of the South and what it means to be a Southerner today.

Keri Leigh Merritt works as a historian and writer in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her B.A. from Emory University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017), won both the Bennett Wall Award from the Southern Historical Association, honoring the best book in Southern economic or business history published in the previous two years, as well as the President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association.

Keri's piece at aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/capitalism-and-underdevelopment-in-the-american-south

Keri's website: https://kerileighmerritt.com/

Dr. Kristin Lunz Trujillo from the University of South Carolina joins to discuss ruralness and identity in America. We talk about the new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, as well as some of the broader ideas about who is rural and what that means for the people living in those places.

You can read Kristin's Newsweek response to White Rural Rage here: 'White Rural Rage' Cites My Research. It Gets Everything About Rural America Wrong