2026 Decoding Racial Code in Affordable Housing News: Linking Media Language to Development Outcomes
About: Prior research has established a strong link between racist attitudes and opposition to affordable housing. In recent years, racial language around affordable housing has become more covert in contexts such as media depictions of proposed developments. This project aims to: (1) leverage a racial meaning decoding framework, grounded in theories of covert racism and informed by empirical instances of coded race talk, to identify racial code words in news articles focused on affordable housing, and 2) link the occurrence of the code words identified in these news articles, to changes in affordable housing stock over time in the geographic regions of the news outlets. We hypothesize that when coded and explicit racial language appear more frequently in news coverage of affordable housing, it reflects lower public support, which is not easily measured longitudinally, and which in turn results in a decrease in the successful development of new affordable housing units. We will explore manual and automated methods for identifying the racial code words in our newspaper corpus, including qualitative hand coding and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms.
Qualifications: Preferred coding experience (Python, R) but not required
Base stipend is $8500 with up to $1500 additional stipend based on financial need.
- Conducting literature reviews on affordable housing, sustainability, and public policy
- Collecting, organizing, and analyzing a news article corpus (no coding experience needed; training will be provided in R and or Python for basic data analysis)
- Learning to give clear presentations and provide brief write-ups of their work
- This is a full-time position; students are expected to participate 35+ hours/week for 10 consecutive weeks. Participants are not permitted to engage in another full-time internship, job, or volunteer opportunity (whether funded by Stanford or otherwise). They also may not hold a part-time internship, job, or volunteer opportunity unless their faculty mentors or program mentors have approved these arrangements before the start of the summer. Students also cannot receive an additional VPUE part-time grant within the same quarter.
- Students must be current undergraduates in good standing at Stanford during the summer quarter; those graduating in June are not eligible.
- Students may not receive both academic units and a stipend for any single project activity.
- Students pursuing a coterminal MA degree are eligible ONLY IF 1) they have not conferred their undergraduate degree AND 2) they are in the undergraduate (not graduate) tuition group.
- Students may not be serving a suspension or be on a Leave of Absence (LOA) while using grant funding.
