Spring Bome Mi

Spring received her BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from University of California, Berkeley in 2018, and her MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago in 2021. Before starting her Ph.D. program in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, she worked as a Special Education Teacher in Vallejo City Unified School District and volunteered as a policy organizer at Show Up for Racial Justice Marin. She is currently working as a Data and Policy Analyst II at Acumen while pursuing her Ph.D.

Spring's intellectual curiosity lies at the intersection of international security and political social psychology. She is interested in how political communication via rhetorical strategies, narrative construction, and issue-framing influence both public opinion and state behavior. Substantively, she studies how the decision-makers' threat construction affects the public's threat perception by examining how the anthropomorphization of threats influences public support for domestic and foreign policy decisions. Lastly, by examining the role of cognition, affect, and group dynamics, Spring seeks to reveal how the study of mass political behavior can enrich pressing questions in international security for not only conventional threats but also non-anthropomorphic threats such as public health crises, environmental disasters, food insecurity, poverty, immigration, and energy management.