Butch is a peer outreach worker at Madison Street Medicine and support staff at Dairy Drive, a transitional housing encampment for people who struggle with chronic homelessness in Madison, Wisconsin. Butch has also served as the Vice President of Occupy Madison, a non-profit cooperative housing community focused on sustainable living and community integration for people that have experienced long-term housing insecurity. His presence and engagement during outreach cultivate trust and a sense of inclusion among clients and he honors the privilege of that trust with his commitment to improving the welfare of those he encounters.

Jorge brings a background in unscripted television production, where he has worked as a producer, associate producer, segment producer, and story producer on television projects. At CAP Lab, he coordinates field production, supports research teams during community-based data collection, and facilitates the planning and execution of the lab's documentary work. Jorge works closely with researchers and community partners to ensure interviews and field experiences are documented with care while helping translate community-engaged research into documentary storytelling that can be shared with broader public audiences.

Siddiqua DeShazer is a skilled outreach specialist with extensive experience in community engagement, crisis intervention, and trauma-informed advocacy. At CAP Lab, they focus on building strategic partnerships, facilitating stakeholder collaboration, and ensuring that research is grounded in the realities of poverty and systemic barriers.

Graduate Assistant

Maggie Sardino is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her solutions-oriented research focuses on urban development, gentrification, and housing policy through the lens of political messaging and community-based research. She is  invested in combining quantitative research alongside public storytelling to highlight issues in housing inequity, uncover policy solutions, and create more just cities.

Graduate Fellow

JD Duncan (they/ he) is a Ph.D. student at UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. JD's ongoing research explore how gender inclusivity is framed in right-wing media, the influence of emotion on fostering support for anti-feminist viewpoints, and the impact of purity culture and rhetoric promoting sexual abstinence on the lived experiences of Christians. JD’s research is rooted in the belief that discourse does not occur in isolation; rather, the voices heard, the perspectives absent, and the ideas repressed have consequences for individuals and society.

Graduate Fellow

Wil Dubree is a Ph.D. student at UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He studies local information ecologies and the profound influence of local journalism in maintaining an informed and just society. Embracing the principles of open science, he strives to enhance the accessibility and availability of research data, methods, and findings, making knowledge more accessible to all.

Dr. Mila Turner is an environmental sociologist. Her primary research specialization is environmental justice and involves the study of historical and present-day environmental disparities as well as the varying impacts of climate change, “natural” disasters, and human-produced hazards on diverse populations. She participates in various environmental justice movements and specializes in helping learners understand the relationships between social inequalities and the distribution of environmental hazards in society along dimensions of power including social class, gender, and race. Beyond her academic work, she leads community development efforts as a neighborhood association leader in Atlanta, translating research into direct advocacy for the communities most affected by displacement and environmental harm.

Dr. Xiaoya Jiang is an Assistant Professor of Computational Communication Her research centers on public opinion on contentious societal issues.  Dr. Jiang uses survey, experiment, news content, and social media data to examine public opinion dynamics with statistical modeling, natural language processing techniques, time series analysis, and social network analysis. She also proposes intervention strategies to shape public opinion based on empirical evidence and grounded in social science theory.  At CAP Lab, she collaborates on mixed-methods research examining how communication, institutions, and lived experience influence health and political outcomes in communities facing poverty and structural disadvantage. 

Dr. Courtney Tabor's research examines the way media, elites, and audiences negotiate power in political communication. She focuses primarily on democratic attitudes and political engagement as shaped by news and entertainment using quantitative methods. Her work has, among other topics, included re-enfranchisement policies for people in prison, youth social movements, and digital inequalities in news access and benefits. This has included in-depth examinations of socioeconomic class, gender, and other divisions of inequality and her research has explored these themes in the US, UK, Brazil, and Kenya.