09/04/2026 | News release | Distributed by Public on 09/04/2026 10:19
Kristen Brock-Petroshius, assistant professor in the Stony Brook University School of Social Welfare, has received one of 29 research grants furnished by the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) this year.
Through RSF's Social, Political, and Economic Inequality research program, Brock-Petroshius - along with Neil Lewis and Jeff Niederdeppe of Cornell University - will evaluate class- and race-based messaging strategies to assess their effectiveness and better understand how racialized policy issues are communicated.
The trio will examine the effects of race, class, and combined race-and-class messaging strategies in the context of differentially racialized policies to address income and wealth inequality - domains with large, well-documented racial group differences in the United States - while advancing methods of discussing race and effectively building support for racial equity.
Additionally, the project seeks to unpack the psychological mechanisms driving observed patterns of effects, including group empathy, zero-sum thinking, and systemic causal attributions.
Read the full story on the School of Social Welfare website.