Professor Melissa Borja was recently featured in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education for her groundbreaking work in creating the Virulent Hate Project, which analyzed, compiled, and mapped incidents of anti-Asian hate in 2020. As reported in the article, Dr. Borja and her research team “identified 1,023 incidents in 4,337 news articles; 679 were incidents of harassment or vandalism, and 344 were incidents of stigmatizing or discriminatory statements, images, policies, or proposals.” After publishing a report in Spring 2021, Dr. Borja and her team worked with LSA IT Advocate Peter Knoop to translate the research into an interactive website, which adopted geographical information system (GIS) software to illustrate the scourge of anti-Asian incidents across the country. As Diverse reports, the Virulent Hate Project will continue to work on further research, including community responses to these problems.
