hi, it’s jordan!

☃️❄️❄️ happy december!! ❄️❄️☃️

meet our three speakers selected for the marginalia science x boston college fall 2024 symposium: dr. xanni brown from uva, dr. minh-duc pham from uconn, and rebecca zhu from stanford.

⭐⭐ don’t forget to check out interviews with members of the marginalia community on the minds matter podcast & the stanford psychology podcast ⭐⭐

🎁💫✨🥟🎁

thanks for reading! subscribe for free to receive new posts.

🎁💫✨🥟🎁

… want to be a guest editor? shoot us an email, sign up via this google form, or DM us on twitter or bluesky & we’ll tell you more!

📚🏉🏔️ Xanni 🍁🏳️‍🌈🥘

Photo Credit: Gerhard Laurich

about me I was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. I then moved to Boston and lived there for seven years, then to New Haven and lived there for seven years. This summer my partner and I moved to Charlottesville, VA, where we are trying to help our dog make some new dog friends.

Currently, I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Mellon program on Race, Place, and Equity at the University of Virginia’s Public Policy School. I use experimental, archival, and qualitative methods to study how majority groups react to increasing diversity in various contexts, and the implications for democratic stability. After an undergraduate degree in Social Studies, I have then been in Psychology, Communications, Political Science, and Public Policy departments. During my spare time, I enjoy cooking, hiking, lifting weights, bar trivia, and learning extremely complicated board games. I also played rugby for many years and currently help coach the undergraduate women’s rugby team at UVA.

📺 watching 👀

Agatha All Along Listen, I fell mostly off the Marvel bandwagon for a while - it was way too many shows/movies and I simply could not keep track. The point is that even if you, like me, have mostly forgotten the plot of Wandavision, Agatha stands on its own as the best and queerest Marvel product out there. Witches on adventures and one of them is Patti Lupone!

Only Murders in the Building As someone who loves podcasts and spent a truly weird amount of time watching old Columbo episodes, Only Murders really hits for me. It’s got the exact right blend of hijinks, mystery, and insane casting. See also Poker Face in this category.

📚 reading 🤓

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry It’s 1989 and the field hockey team from Danvers High School (location of the Salem Witch Trials) is resorting to dark magic to try to make it to the state championship. Barry’s fragmented, evocative prose weaves together coming of age, found family, Satanic Panic, and the eternal urgency of high school sports.

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki This beautiful, genre-defying book, also centered on found family (and what exactly makes a donut delicious), contains heavy themes buoyed by humor and joy. A trans runaway is determined to become a violin prodigy, and it leads her to a fantastical world of deeply strange and sympathetic characters.

👂 listening 🎧

As a longtime country music gal, I am surprised and delighted to find myself mostly in my pop girlie era: Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, The Chicks, and Maggie Rogers are all top of the rotation at the moment.

💻 some papers I can’t stop thinking about:

• White by another name? Can anti-Christian bias claims serve as a racial dog whistle?

  Al-Kire, R. L., Miller, C. A., Pasek, M., Perry, S. L., & Wilkins, C. L. | Psychological science (2024)

• How narratives of racial progress create barriers to diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizations.

  Kraus, M. W., Torrez, B., & Hollie, L. | Current opinion in psychology (2022)

• Managing emotions in the face of discrimination: The differential effects of self-immersion, self-distanced reappraisal, and positive reappraisal.

  Duker, A., Green, D. J., Onyeador, I. N., & Richeson, J. A. | Emotion (2022)

• Welcome to be like us: Expectations of outgroup assimilation shape dominant group resistance to diversity.

  Danbold, F., & Huo, Y. J. | Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2022)

💻 💎 💎 recent papers by me:

• Political ideology moderates White Americans’ reactions to racial demographic population change.

  Brown, X., Rucker, J., and Richeson, J. | Group Processes & Intergroup Relations (2022)

• Race and Racism

  Richeson, J. A., Rucker, J. M. & Brown, X. | Handbook of Social Psychology (2024) [I can’t share a preprint of this yet, but it is coming out soon and the whole handbook will be freely available online!]

💌🔻🥥 minh-duc pham (pronounced: min duke without “k” in the end)

about me I go by both duc and minh-duc. born and raised in saigon, vietnam and moved to the U.S. for undergrad. i am phd candidate currently working with Drs. Kim Chaney and Alexandra Garr-Schultz at UConn in Spring 2025. my research broadly aims to understand activism and intraminority solidarity through a critical lens. on top of my research, i organize with multiple anti-racist, decolonial collectives on various fronts, in and outside of academia. I also love arts, particularly photography and film. I did a bunch of photojournalism of social movements, and my secret dream is to eventually have a fair/conference with artists, researchers, writers gathering to discuss ideas and act toward liberation. in a shorter term, i am on the job market this year and hoping to land a fitting job in the northeast! (also hoping to bring my sister, who is currently in vietnam, to join me here in the states!)

📺 watching 👀

I’ve been rewatching my comfort show one day at a time with my boyfriend (he is now obsessed with the show, even more than me) - definitely recommend for so many reasons (esp if you wanna cry and laugh at the same time) but hmu fr if you take up this rec and love it. another good one is abbott (but i feel like everyone watches it). oh grey’s! is def my guilty pleasure lmao, it is so problematic and neoliberal but what can i say… if y’all want a survival show, maybe try hate-watching “from” (it is kinda bad ngl). My boyfriend also got me into the voice recently lolol, but my favs were already eliminated so idk (but check out austyns stancil!!)

📚 reading 🤓

haven’t been reading as much as I’d like to (which is so tragic) but mr. baldwin has been consistently in my reading: giovanni’s room, the fire next time. alexis pauline gumbs is another fav writer of mine so i’ve also been reading her autobiography of audre lorde. But i would highly recommend undrown by alexis if y’all want a meditation kind of book connecting you with nature. Also very looking forward to the perfect victim by mohammed el-kurd and ocean vuong’s upcoming novel!!!

👂 listening 🎧

been listening to a looooot of viet music these days, especially from the 80s. Idk i feel so calm in my existence listening to it (am i getting old??). But if anyone wanna give it a try, try Thanh Lam, Wren Evans, or Binz :)

💻 some papers i’m (trying!) to read this month👇

• Transforming Neoliberal Social Psychology Into An Emancipatory Science: A Call To Abolish The Police.

  Gampa, A, & Sawyer, J. | Annual Review of Critical Psychology (2024) (this one i’ve read so many times but it’s soooo good)

• Delegitimizing protest: Psychology's omissions and commissions.

  Porter-Cash A. | Social and Personality Psychology Compass (2024).

• Germany then and now: Guilt, white supremacy and sustaining genocide, from the far-right to the radical left.

  Becker, J. | Human Geography (2024)

💎 awesome work by minh-duc 💎

• Passing down the mic signals trustworthy intersectional allyship and promotes organizational identity-safety.

  Pham, M. D., & Chaney, K. E | Social Psychological and Personality Science (in press)

• “Our wars are the same”: (Horizontal) collectivism is associated with lay theory of generalized prejudice.

  Pham, M. D., Chaney, K. E., & Lin, M | Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (in press)

• Development and validation of the Abolitionist Ideology Scale with abolitionist-identifying and nationally representative samples.

  Oswald, F., Pham, M. D., & Chaney, K. E | Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (2024)

🧋🇨🇦🍹Rebecca 🐕🍵🐶

about me I was born in Shanghai, China, and moved with my parents to Ottawa, Canada when I was three. After stints in Toronto and Boston, I realized that there were warmer places in the world, and have been living in the Bay Area ever since!

My research investigates when and how children acquire and learn from symbolic systems, such as pictures and language. In one line of research, I investigate the mechanisms underlying children’s acquisition of various kinds of non-literal language, such as metaphor and metonymy. In another line of research, I work with urban and rural Kenyan children to investigate whether picture comprehension is intuitive for all children, or whether picture comprehension requires extensive experience with picture books and other visual symbols. At Stanford, I’m also working on LEVANTE, a new open, cross-cultural, child development initiative led by Mike Frank.

I love dogs (especially small, fluffy, white ones), vinyasa yoga, and the Sweetgreen shroomami salad, in that order.

📺 watching 👀

Loot - Maya Rudolph gives me warm fuzzy feelings.

📚 reading 🤓

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty - I’ve spent the past few years trying to read all the Pulitzer Prize Fiction winners. A lot of the books are misses (and the older winners aren’t very diverse), but Lonesome Dove was one of the best books I’ve read in years. It’s generous, tough, funny, and warm all the way through.

👂 listening 🎧

I call the time after Halloween and before Christmas “Sufjan Season”, because it’s so dark out and everyone’s tired and waiting for the holidays. But this year, in addition to having the entire “Carrie and Lowell” album on repeat, I’m listening to peppier stuff like the Brat remixes and a lot of Dominic Fike too.

💻 paper i’m very excited about👇

• Understanding cultural variation in cognition one child at a time.

  Bohn, M., Fong, F.T.K., Pope-Caldwell, S., Stengelin, R., & Haun, D.B.M. | Nature Reviews Psychology (2024)

Recently published papers by me:

• The development of picture comprehension across early environments: Evidence from urban and rural toddlers in Western Kenya.

  Zhu, R., Pitchik, H.O., Kilonzo, T.N., Engelmann, J., Fernald, L., & Gopnik, A. | Developmental Science (2025)

• Preschoolers and adults learn from novel metaphors.

  Zhu, R., & Gopnik. A. | Psychological Science (2023)

• Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE): A global framework for measuring children’s learning variability through collaborative data sharing. Frank, M.C., Baumgartner, H., Braginsky, M., Kachergis, G., Lightbody, A., Sparks, R.Z., Zhu, R., Carlson, S.M., Graham, S., Lipina, S.J., Newcombe, N.S., Odgers, C.L., Pianta, R.C., Siegler, R.S., Snowling, M., Yoshikawa, Dodge, K.A., & Cubillo, A. | Under review

✌✌✌

in support & science,

📚 MARGINALIA SCIENCE 📚

THIS MONTH’S ROUND-UP 🤩

💎 awesome work we thought you might like 💎

• Girls persist more but divest less from ineffective teaching than boys

  Mia Radovanovic, Ece Yucer & Jessica A. Sommerville | Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2024)

• Signaling (in)tolerance: Social evaluation and metaethical relativism and objectivism

  David Moss, Andres Montealegre, Lance S. Bush, Lucius Caviola & David Pizarro | Cognition (2024)

👓  OTHER THINGS THAT MIGHT INTEREST YOU 🚀

• upcoming workshop on peer review on Dec 4th (info here)

• EASP summer school applications are due soon! more info here

• the wy-lab at cornell is looking for a lab manager to start fall 2025, please have any interested undergrads email me at jordan.wylie@cornell.edu

• will you be in denver at SPSP in 2025? marginalia will host another get together using the whova app, so be on the lookout for our meetup there!

and for those of you on the market, no matter where you’re at right now -- offer in hand, fingers-still-crossed, looking at post-docs, exploring options outside academia -- we support you!!!

and, of course, feel free to email us with questions, ideas, etc to add to this list!