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Public advocacy website envisioned by CU Boulder associate professor Laurie Gries tracks swastikas across the U.S. and offers resources to counter those hate-filled incidents

In the months leading up to Donald Trump鈥檚 election in 2016, Laurie Gries, director of the University of Colorado Boulder 听and associate professor of English, became increasingly concerned about almost-daily news reports of swastikas鈥攕ometimes accompanied by hate-filled messages鈥攕howing up in public spaces across the country.

鈥淭his was the same time when various sources were reporting rising incidents of hate and bias in the United States, when Donald Trump and his racist and divisive rhetoric was just coming into political power, and when white nationalist organizations seemed to be coming out of the woodwork,鈥� she says.

Determined to address the issue of the swastikas head on, Gries began working on a project with a team of interdisciplinary scholars with expertise in visual communication, critical geography and social justice education. Their aim was to identify how and where swastikas were placed, who they targeted, what messages they conveyed and how communities responded. The coordinated results of that five-year effort鈥攚hich document 1,340 swastika incidents in total鈥攔ecently went live on website.

Recently, Gries spoke with Colorado College of Arts and Sciences Magazine about the Swastika Counter Project. Her answers were lightly edited for style and condensed for space limitations.

Question: How did the swastika project come together and why did you decide you needed to address this issue?

Gries: When Trump first came onto the political scene, I started hearing about increased incidents of hate and violence, and as a visual rhetoric scholar, I began noticing more and more reports of swastikas showing up on the streets of the United States.

On the day that Trump was elected, I woke up deeply concerned and asked, 鈥榃hat if I tracked these swastikas? What if I took the digital research method called iconographic tracking that I worked for 10 years to develop and applied it to this particular case? What might we discover?鈥�

I didn鈥檛 really start tracking swastikas on that day; I just made the commitment because I had long wanted to use my scholarship for public humanities research. I guess, then, one might say that Trump was the motivator, but really it was fear. At the time, a lot of people鈥攖he FBI, the Southern Poverty Law Center, journalists and scholars鈥攚ere attributing a rise in antisemitism and violence to his rhetoric. It was my fear that if that鈥檚 the case, those incidents were surely only going to be amplified as he rose to power.

I don鈥檛 have any comparative data (i.e., data on swastika incidents) prior to Trump鈥檚 arrival on the political scene to confirm whether that鈥檚 true or not, so I鈥檓 very careful to say that the data we collected can鈥檛 really be used as evidence for that claim, but in our data, we certainly can see that there are a lot of associations that people are making between swastikas and Donald Trump and white nationalism.

Question: Was no one else tracking and compiling these incidents in which swastikas were being placed at houses of worship, schools and other sites?

Gries: Actually, there are quite a few projects that have tracked antisemitism, and even swastikas, but they have been constrained in various ways. Some sites only track antisemitism that happen on college campuses. Some track antisemitic events that happened all over the world. Then there are sites like ProPublica, whose tracking projects were limited to a particular year. So, I wanted to create a project that would transcend some those constraints.

Question: What are some of the top findings of your research as it relates to swastika placement, any language accompanying the swastikas, maybe any surprises your research uncovered?

Gries: I think it鈥檚 important to note that the swastika incidents we discovered occurred in all 48 contiguous states and in the District of Columbia, so this is a national problem. Of course, they were showing up more in cities with large populations, which is to be expected. But we were surprised that according to our data, swastika incidents most often surfaced in schools, and almost equally in K-12 and higher education settings. We thought swastikas might mostly show up on the exterior of religious institutions, and particularly Jewish religious institutions, but that wasn鈥檛 the case.

We also were surprised to discover so many swastikas surfacing in private spaces. Of course, a lot of swastikas were spray painted on the exterior of buildings in urban spaces. But our data discloses how swastikas were often drawn on people鈥檚 cars, on their homes, on the dorm doors of students, and in some cases, on the interior walls of people鈥檚 homes that had been broken into and, in one case, lit on fire.

I think the other most surprising finding was just the horrific language that was showing up alongside swastikas鈥攆rom racist and homophobic appeals to white nationalism to implicit threats of surveillance and violence to direct threats of genocide. And also that such threats were directed at not only Jewish community members; a lot of Black American, Latinx, LGBTQ-plus community members and immigrants were also commonly targeted. It was just overwhelming鈥攖he multi-directional hate and very graphic violence.

Question: How did Colorado compare to other parts of the country when it came to swastika incidents?

Gries: For Colorado, there were 30 reported incidents in our data set. So, I would say it鈥檚 not uncommon in Colorado for these swastikas incidents to occur, and I鈥檝e had a lot of people tell me about swastikas they witnessed that aren鈥檛 even in our data set.

We know, for instance, that Colorado State University in Fort Collins has had so many swastika incidents that they recently created an antisemitism task force. One of our (Swastika Counter Project) advisory board members is actually heading up that task force because antisemitism on that campus has become such a serious problem.

Question: Beyond tracking incidents of swastika placement around the country, what other kinds of information can be found on the Swastika Counter Project website?

Gries: Part of our challenge was figuring out how to present the data in ways that would be useful for a variety of community stakeholders鈥攑eople who are dealing with swastika incidents in their communities, such as school administrators, teachers and parents, the local police force, and local and national politicians. We wanted to create a swastika tracking project that has a strong civic component to it, which I think makes this project a bit unique. So, we created an interactive map that can be filtered in different ways; data visualizations that can be easily downloaded; and educational resources and lesson plans for teachers at various levels. We also generated two different reports, one of which describes and analyzes how different communities have responded to swastika incidents, so that stakeholders can read those accounts and learn from them. That鈥檚 especially important, because in our research we found that the various stakeholders often worked in isolation in responding to swastika incidents.

Question: The Swastika 鈥楥ounter鈥� Project鈥攊s it fair to say the name is a play on words?

Gries: Yes鈥攊t鈥檚 a double entendre. The goal is to both count and counter the contemporary proliferation of swastika incidents in the United States. And in that sense, the Swastika Counter Project is very much a scholarly activist project.

When we first began tracking swastika incidents, we planned to simply report our data and let the evidence speak for itself. And to a great extent, the data still does do that. Our findings report, for instance, is largely descriptive. But the longer we worked on the project and discovered the gross horror of violence that was ensuing, the more we felt compelled to also take more concerted action by building out the educational component of the website. So today, I don鈥檛 pretend that the data advocacy website isn鈥檛 motivated by my own desire to try to address some very real, pressing problems and to use my scholarship to try to create a more just world. This is very much a project where I鈥檓 wearing my activism on my sleeve.

Question: What kind of assistance did you have when it came to tracking and compiling data, creating visual representations, developing a website, etc.?

Gries: The central work of tracking, coding, and analyzing was done by myself and Kelly Wheeler (assistant professor at Curry College), but we soon realized we needed more help. I reached out to Morteza Karimzadeh in the geography department here at CU Boulder, and he and his former student, Jason Miller, ended up doing all the amazing work with the mapping part of the project.

I am also really proud that we received a lot of help from various students at and beyond CU. For instance, an undergraduate computer science major at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, worked on the data visualizations with us, while graduate students from that same institution helped to create some of the lesson plans. Here at CU Boulder, a team of undergraduate students enrolled in a technical communication and design class in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric did a user-centered study for us to help develop a website that would be easy to navigate and comprehend for a public audience. And then another group of tech comm students helped us figure out how to invite community participation through features under the Contribute tab of the website. In this sense, the Swastika Counter Project is really exemplary of the immense value that data humanities and public humanities education can have for both undergraduate and graduate students. I am really excited about that.

Question: People who commit several years of their life to a project will often call it a labor of love. Is that how you would describe this project?

Gries: For me, I don鈥檛 think it was about love so much as it was about committing to do social justice work and really trying to walk the walk. I mean, as you might imagine, it was not fun to track so many incidents of hate and violence around the country. 鈥�

It鈥檚 also just been a beast in terms of labor. I tell people that this project was probably more intense work than my first 350-page monograph because I had to teach myself so many new skills, not only in terms of research, but also guiding and managing team projects, doing data advocacy, and developing web content skills. I am so glad I did this project, but for the last eight years, it鈥檚 just been very intense.

Question: If former President Trump is elected to a second term in November, do you think you would take up this project again?

Gries: I鈥檓 really, really torn. Part of me wants to try to secure some national funding and put together a larger team. If I did, I would also want to research (swastika incidents during) the Biden administration, and then start tracking in the present time, too, because I think that longitudinal study would help us address certain questions that we weren鈥檛 able to address in this project.

On the other hand, I started this project in early 2017, and it became a large part of my life. My husband would tell me that on days I was doing the researching and the coding that I was affectively different. I was angry. I was upset. I was impatient.

I honestly don鈥檛 know if I want to put myself through that again on a personal level. I truly believe that more arts and humanities faculty need to be doing this kind of work, as I think we can bring an important perspective to data-driven research that addresses pressing socio-cultural problems. And maybe if I had the funding and could put together a large enough team where I didn鈥檛 have to bear so much of the burden I would consider it, but right now I just don鈥檛 know.

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