The latest episode of the Conflict Tipping podcast from Mediatedotcom is now live! In this episode I speak with Jan Gerrit Voelkel, a PhD candidate in the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University, who recently co-led a massive, 35-thousand-person, multi-country study that tested 25 different ways to reduce partisan animosity and anti-democratic attitudes. We talk about:
- 💡 How the Strengthening Democracy Challenge came about
- ✨ Jan’s favourite interventions
- 😊 The most successful interventions
- 🫂 What we can do as mediators and individuals to apply these findings to our practice
- 🫰 Opportunities for funding (!) – note that this is open to practitioner/academic collaborations, and the team is happy to help pair practitioners with academics where needed
- Podcast on different platforms: https://linktr.ee/conflicttipping (it’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio and more).
- Strengthening democracy challenge: https://www.strengtheningdemocracychallenge.org/
- Grant opportunity: https://www.strengtheningdemocracychallenge.org/grants
- Jan’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jgvoelkel
- The Stanford PASCL twitter: https://twitter.com/pascl_stanford
- Jan’s academic page: https://sociology.stanford.edu/people/jan-gerrit-voelkel
Jan Gerrit Voelkel is a Ph.D. Student in Sociology at Stanford University. Jan’s research studies intergroup and interpersonal relationships with two guiding research questions. First, what causes people’s willingness to harm others and defend inequalities? And second, how can personal or societal change be achieved that increases equality and/or reduces harm? Jan has developed interventions that increase support for policies that aim to reduce economic inequality or increase opportunity for immigrants. Jan has also led the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, a megastudy that tested 25 crowdsourced interventions for reducing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity.