Episode description

At INFORMED 2024, a conference hosted by the Knight Foundation in January, one panel focused on the subject of information integrity, race, and US elections. The conversation was compelling, and the panelists agreed to reprise it for this podcast. So today we're turning over the mic to Spencer Overton, a Professor of Law at the George Washington University, and the director of the GW Law School's Multiracial Democracy Project.

He's joined by three other experts, including:

• Brandi Collins-Dexter, a media and technology fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, a fellow at the National Center on Race and Digital Justice, and the author of the recent book, Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future. Brandi is developing a podcast of her own with MediaJustice that explores 1980s era media, racialized conspiracism, and politics in Chicago;
• Dr. Danielle Brown, a social movement and media researcher who holds the 1855 Community and Urban Journalism professorship at Michigan State and is the founding director of the LIFT project, which is focused on mapping, networking and resourcing, trusted messengers to dismantle mis- and disinformation narratives that circulate in Black communities and about Black communities; and
• Kathryn Peters, who was the inaugural executive director of University of North Carolina's Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life and was the co-founder of Democracy Works, where she built programs to help more Americans navigate how to vote. These days, she's working on a variety of projects to empower voters and address election mis- and disinformation.