CCCR ALUMNI Q&A – Jo Lukito

One of the hallmarks of the CCCR is the graduate training we provide to and with our students. We are delighted to share an edited and condensed version of a conversation between CCCR Director Mike Wagner and UW-SJMC PhD and CCCR alum Jo Lukito (UW-Madison Ph.D., 2020). Jo Lukito is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media. She has published nearly four dozen articles, book chapters, and public-facing reports examining cross-platform media language in the global political communication context, where she tends to focus upon the interactions between news and a variety of social media platforms.

MW: Hi Jo, it is great to talk with you. To begin, tell us about a recent paper that you published that you are especially excited to share.

JL: One of the papers that was published last year was called, ““No Reason[.] [It]/Should/Happen Here”: Analyzing Flynn’s Retroactive Doublespeak During a QAnon Event,” and it was a deep dive into a particular events from a QAnon conspiracy theory. At the time it felt like a mishmash, but now it feels much more like pieces of a puzzle put together regarding the event itself, what occurred during the event, but also the aftermath of one of their speakers, Michael Flynn, who made a pro insurrectionist pro coup type comment. And so we were exploring both the event itself as a political phenomenon and the news coverage around the event, the public discourse around the event, and how the community within QAnon itself talked about it.

I really found that paper fascinating to work on for two reasons. First, from a theoretical perspective, it really provided this deep dive into QAnon. As a community, I think we have a tendency, when we look at these sort of conspiracy groups or extremist groups, to sort of reduce them into like, “oh, well, they’re extremists, or they don’t know what they’re talking about,” or “they must be crazy.” But the reality is many people find identity and community and support within these extremist communities. And if we want to unpack and understand why this is happening in our democracy, we need to understand how these forms of community building. I felt really fortunate to work on it just to understand the sort of dark sides of democracy that I hadn’t explored previously.

It’s like a lot of my work in that, well, one reason I’m productive is that I much prefer having a research question and then identifying the correct methods that are used to study that particular thing in this case. I was really proud of the how the paper kind of balances all those different methods. One thing I enjoy is how really strong empirical research contributes back to the world. So being able to collaborate on a project like this that had qualitative and quantitative components that called for thinking through really hard questions that helped build the way researchers think about far right movements and conspiracy movements. It was an incredible experience that culminated in a paper I’m really proud of.

MW: There’s been a few a few trips around the sun since you’ve been studying here at the UW. But the way you describe your work is the way we would ambitiously hope to describe what we’re doing at CCCR, with respect to different kinds of methods and pursuing questions and engaging in collaboration. Can you talk a bit about your experience at the SJMC, in our Ph.D. program, and the CCCR and how they played a role, if any, in your development as a scholar.

JL: Gosh! It does feel like so long ago I joined the School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 2015 as a first-year graduate student. And it was actually my first time going to school and living out of New York City. Wisconsin was my dream school. The SJMC was my dream program. But I didn’t know what life would be like, and I really tried to throw myself into the experience of being a researcher as a graduate student. And I, I feel really lucky in that department to have a cohort that was eager to collaborate on research projects. One of my favorite experiences was actually in, like my first couple of classes or research group meetings, people just saying when they didn’t know something, and as a researcher that was kind of eye opening to me to just be able to admit when I didn’t know something, and when I was excited to learn about it, and I think those sort of experiences as a graduate student encouraged me to be as curious and inquisitive, but also as honest about what I didn’t know and what I needed to learn more about. And then, when I became a research assistant in CCCR, That was my kind of gateway into learning, not just how to do research collaboratively, but how to do research collaboratively and systematically. One of the things I’ve always been really impressed with in CCCR is the wealth of variety. There are scholars there who work on surveys, and who work on computational methods, who do really deep qualitative thinking, and before joining CCCR, I wasn’t quite sure how those things fit together. Being in CCCR meetings helped me realize how projects come together when people are coming from different backgrounds, paradigms and perspectives.

I also learned about “how do you keep a system like that going?” When you think about the amount of surveys that are sent out into the field or the amount of data you ultimately collect from these organizations, there is just a lot of that sort of infrastructural stuff I learned about, how do you manage a research center, not just a research project, but a center that sustainably does research year by year as a community. That was something that I was really inspired with in CCCR, and definitely since leaving Wisconsin. That’s something that continues to fuel my research.

MW: What advice would you have to a new student in our program? There are lots of different ways to approach graduate study. If you had their attention for a few minutes, what would you want them to know?

JL: What a great question! One. There’s this comic strip that I had seen previously about grad school. The comic strip is called make peace with your own timeline. One of the things it talked about was just the varying experiences that graduate students have. And I think for graduate students, there is this tendency to compete with each other—both within a cohort and when you look at the cohorts above you. You look at people who graduate from a department and it can feel really intimidating. Am I going to live up to that expectation? Am I gonna be as productive as this famous person who graduated from the program? I think if I could give anyone any first-year graduate student advice in Wisconsin or outside of Wisconsin, I would say it’s to make peace with your own timeline, and work in a way that balances work life and home life, and in a way that makes you happy. Ultimately, I really do believe that happy researchers produce amazing scholarship

And, grab all the opportunities that are made available to you, because Wisconsin is so full of amazing research opportunities. It’s really one of the few places that I know where students are not just seen as students, but seen as future collaborators, seen as leading scholars in the field, seen as the next generation of researchers. I think that’s something that graduate students at UW in particular can really take to heart and embrace.

MW: Thank you, Jo.

JL: My pleasure! What fun questions.