Jack LaViolette’s research while affiliated with Columbia University and other places

In the 2021–2022 school year, more books were banned in US school districts than in any previous year. Book banning and other forms of information censorship have serious implications for democratic processes, and censorship has become a central theme of partisan political rhetoric in the United States. However, there is little empirical work on the exact content, predictors of, and repercussions of this rise in book bans. Using a comprehensive dataset of 2,532 bans that occurred during the 2021–2022 school year from PEN America, combined with county-level administrative data, multiple book-level digital trace datasets, restricted-use book sales data, and a new crowd-sourced dataset of author demographic information, we find that (i) banned books are disproportionately written by people of color and feature characters of color, both fictional and historical, in children's books; (ii) right-leaning counties that have become less conservative over time are more likely to ban books than neighboring counties; and (iii) national and state levels of interest in books are largely unaffected after they are banned. Together, these results suggest that rather than serving primarily as a censorship tactic, book banning in this recent US context, targeted at low-interest children's books featuring diverse characters, is more similar to symbolic political action to galvanize shrinking voting blocs.

This article sheds light on how to capture knowledge integration dynamics in college course content, improves and enriches the definition and measurement of interdisciplinarity, and expands the scope of research on the benefits of interdisciplinarity to postcollege outcomes. We distinguish between what higher education institutions claim regarding interdisciplinarity and what they appear to actually do. We focus on the core academic element of student experience—the courses they take, develop a text-based semantic measure of interdisciplinarity in college curriculum, and test its relationship to average earnings of graduates from different types of schools of higher education. We observe that greater exposure to interdisciplinarity—especially for science majors—is associated with increased earnings after college graduation.

In recent years, the concept of "misogynistic extremism" has emerged as a subject of interest among scholars, governments, law enforcement personnel, and the media. Yet a consistent understanding of how misogynistic extremism is defined and conceptualized has not yet emerged. Varying epistemological orientations may contribute to the current conceptual muddle of this topic, reflecting long-standing and on-going challenges with the conceptualization of its individual components. To address the potential impact of misogynistic extremism (i.e., violent attacks), a more precise understanding of what this phenomenon entails is needed. To summarize the existing knowledge base on the nature of misogynistic extremism, this scoping review analyzed publications within English-language peer-reviewed and gray literature sources. Seven electronic databases and citation indexes were systematically searched using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist and charted using the 2020 PRISMA flow diagram. Inclusion criteria included English peer-reviewed articles and relevant gray literature publications, which contained the term "misogynistic extremism" and other closely related terms. No date restrictions were imposed. The search strategy initially yielded 475 publications. After exclusion of ineligible articles, 40 publications remained for synthesis. We found that misogynistic extremism is most frequently conceptualized in the context of misogynistic incels, male supremacism, far-right extremism, terrorism, and the black pill ideology. Policy recommendations include increased education among law enforcement and Countering and Preventing Violent Extremism experts on male supremacist violence and encouraging legal and educational mechanisms to bolster gender equality. Violence stemming from misogynistic worldviews must be addressed by directly acknowledging and challenging socially embedded systems of oppression such as white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy.