Sumitra Badrinathan

@sumitra.bsky.social

assistant professor @AmericanU. working on countering misinformation in developing countries. @upenn.edu PhD in polisci & philly sports fan. outdoors most of the time 📍washington, dc https://sumitrabadrinathan.github.io/

i wake up every morning and watch 100 reels. each w at least a million views. the bjp’s misinformation IT unit has zero clue how to deal with ig & tiktok style content from a generation that thrives on 5 to 10 second dopamine hits held a few inches from your face www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/w...

Phones in Hand, India’s Young Protesters Blast Through Modi’s Media Control (Gift Article)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tightly constructed image is being punctured as a Gen Z-led protest movement uses videos and memes to seize the digital narrative.

nytimes.com

This #OpenAccess study examines how group status influences political attitudes among Indian Americans. Findings reveal that minority groups maintain stable liberal views, while majority groups shift their positions based on context. bit.ly/3Tf3x1B @sumitra.bsky.social @milanv.bsky.social #Sociology

Home and Away: Explaining the Paradoxical Political Attitudes of Indian Americans - Political Behavior

Do individuals hold fixed political attitudes that persist across different contexts, or do their views shift depending on their group’s relative status within each setting? We argue that political preferences are shaped in part by whether one’s group is positioned as a majority or a minority in a given context. Groups that consistently occupy minority positions tend to hold stable, liberal attitudes driven by support for minority rights. In contrast, groups that are majorities in one context but minorities in another are more likely to adopt context-specific views, endorsing liberal positions where they are disadvantaged and more conservative stances where they are dominant. We test this argument using an original, nationally representative survey of Indian Americans, a diaspora population for whom both U.S. and Indian politics are politically salient. We delineate two main findings. First, Indian Americans concurrently support more liberal policies when thinking about the United States and more conservative policies when considering the Indian context. Second, these differences are largely driven by religion: while Muslim Indian Americans – minorities in both contexts – maintain consistently liberal attitudes, Hindu Indian Americans express liberal views in the United States but more conservative stances in India, where Hindu majoritarianism has become entrenched. These findings have important implications for understanding political behavior in the United States, as well as the role of group status and perceptions of majoritarianism in shaping attitudes.

bit.ly

here are some of america’s greatest accomplishments at 250, in my humble opinion as a brown person who has lived here for a decade: 1. the national park service 2. baseball culture 3. tom petty 4. pickle flavored kombucha 5. waffle house

Sumitra Badrinathan@sumitra.bsky.social · last mo.

happy 250 america 🇺🇸 what a privilege to live in a country with this much natural beauty. trying to see all of it is an endless lifetime of adventure if you choose it. we are so lucky, i hope we can recognize that and work to protect it.

happy 250 america 🇺🇸 what a privilege to live in a country with this much natural beauty. trying to see all of it is an endless lifetime of adventure if you choose it. we are so lucky, i hope we can recognize that and work to protect it.

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lots of discussion on how this will affect tech jobs, but once again this applies to academia also every professor you know on a visa will now have to leave the US for a green card, sometimes for multiple years. many will give up in the process. universities may not give them back their jobs.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🚨 🚨 🚨 NEW: A shocking @USCIS memo seems to declare that hundreds of thousands of immigrants living in this country and applying for green cards must instead apply for visas abroad; which could MASSIVELY disrupt lives. 🧵 on what we know, and what we don’t.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services
PM-602-0199
May 21, 2026
Policy Memorandum
SUBJECT: Adjustment of Status is a Matter of Discretion and Administrative Grace, and an Extraordinary Relief that Permits Applicants to Dispense with the Ordinary Consular Visa Process
Purpose
This memorandum reminds officers and the public that adjustment of status under section 245 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) is a matter of discretion and administrative grace not designed to supersede the regular consular processing of immigrant visas. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) reaffirms this consistent and longstanding approach and declares as a matter of general policy its intention to faithfully apply the statutes consistently with this understanding.