Introducing a special series of The PARK podcast called “Political Empathy Lab Summer 2024: 10 weeks, 5 trips, 1 election.

For 10 weeks this summer, Dr. Lia Howard and seven Penn undergraduates will travel throughout the state, across at least 57 counties conversing with Pennsylvanians, putting skills and dispositions of political empathy into direct practice.

They will be doing so connecting with people not by polling or canvasing, but simply engaging in face to face conversations listening to people from different parts of the state -rural, suburban, urban -who hold different values and demographic and political identities. They will be engaging in participant observation, interviews and other ethnographic methodologies to guide their travels.

In short, Political Empathy Lab endeavors to better understand our fellow Pennsylvanians through better conversations with them. Perhaps there are larger lessons to be learned that can be applied to other conversations throughout the nation.

We invite you to travel with us and follow the project. Six episodes of the podcast will drop over the course of the summer with tools that you can try when you encounter folks you don’t know at the grocery store or at a public park.

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