Dr. Hee Yun Lee (MPI) and her team were awarded a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s funding program Data Visualization of Structural Racism and Place.
Thier project will create graphic representations of complex data that can be used to help understand the influence of structural racism on anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project will also examine how anti-Asian hate crimes impact Asian Americans’ health and wellbeing. The team will create these graphic tools using several datasets, including FBI data, social media data collected via X (formerly Twitter), and each state’s sociodemographic and COVID-19 related data. Data visualization makes it easier to interpret complex measures often associated with structural discrimination and can be a powerful means to communicate the findings with policymakers, community partners, and others who are best positioned to make decisions on mitigating the structural racism’s effects. This project will be the first study to visually communicate data showing structural racism’s impact on community health and to contextualize the legacy of racism among Asian Americans in the U.S.
Dr. Lee’s interdisciplinary team includes Ms. Sruthi Chandrasekaran (MPI) at the Asian American Foundation and other collaborators including data producers, data scientists, communications experts, and designers.