Congratulations to the 24th annual Miller Research Award recipients:

• Hillary Shulman, associate professor 
• Rachel Lopez, master’s degree student 
• Kara Fort, PhD student 
• Jorge Cruz Ibarra, PhD student 
• Elizabeth Riggs, PhD student
• Rachel Barry Wade, PhD student 
• Monique Turner, external collaborator 

Shulman, Lopez, Fort, Ibarra and Riggs were recognized for their project titled "An Examination of How Foreign Languages are Processed in Narratives: An Initial Investigation.” The project aims to better understand how people intuitively respond to bilingual speech. The idea is that people who use heavy accents or who drop in foreign language terms while talking sometimes get discriminated against only because they are hard to understand. 

Other work in this area has found that people get annoyed when they have to work hard to understand someone, and when this happens, people, often subconsciously, target their annoyance towards the person, which leads to hostility. 

The authors hope that by pointing out that this phenomenon happens, they can help bring attention to this aspect of discrimination.

Wade, Shulman and Turner were recognized for their project titled "Race, Resignation and Activism.” The goal of this project is to understand whether calls to action impact different communities differently and if political messages that are a call for action (e.g., go vote!) can actually lead to inaction, rather than action, for minoritized groups. The idea is that minoritized groups are often asked to do a lot of work politically since a lot of political initiatives target these communities. Therefore, although the ask is important, these initiatives can also be exhausting and not work as well as promised.