Islands of solidarity

I'm thrilled to be named a 2025 Andrew Carnegie fellow. My project, Public Health in Polarized Times: Finding “Islands of Solidarity” for Effective Digital Public Health Campaigns in the U.S, aims to help Americans find common ground and build solidarity around protecting the public's health. 

Public health is more polarized than at any other time in US history, and polarization has been shown to have multiple impacts on health behaviors, policies, and outcomes. Polarization impedes the development of strong health policies and support for public health interventions. And it has been tied to poorer individual health outcomes and weaker health systems in the US. As public health polarization accelerated rapidly during COVID, many practitioners found themselves navigating fraught (and even dangerous) political landscapes with minimal guidance on how to manage public health in polarized environments. Online environments and rampant social media disinformation have made public health’s mission even more fraught. While scholars are beginning to understand how polarization impacts health outcomes, there is little knowledge about what can be done to address it.

Public health efforts rely on shared core beliefs across society related to ideas such as communal obligation, risk pooling, and the social value of prevention. Without finding common moral ground and shared goals, effective public health policy is nearly impossible. There is much that public health can learn from recent advances in polarization research. Studies show that bridging the perception gap and correcting for misperceptions of opposing political groups can reduce polarization. More importantly for this project, affective polarization can be reduced by efforts to bring communities together to find common ground, identify shared values, and work towards collective goals. 

Though Americans tend to perceive public health as highly politicized, we have more common ground when it comes to public health interventions than we think, including for controversial topics like healthcare reform and pandemic mitigation. During COVID, highly polarized countries like Germany, South Korea and Vietnam nevertheless achieved significant success in combating the pandemic by finding common ground and appealing to citizens’ sense of solidarity. Activism has also powerfully shifted health politics towards greater solidarity, as in South Africa, where patient-activists transformed the country’s politics on HIV/AIDS from staunch denialism to broad support in less than a decade.

This project seeks to identify and learn from insights like these to identify how societies build and protect "islands of solidarity" when it comes to public health. This project will help policymakers, public health advocates, and clinicians  address broader questions, such as: How can public health campaigns successfully navigate US political polarization in the post-COVID digital age? How can US digital media environments be leveraged to foster solidarity rather than polarization around core public health interventions?