Hopkins anthropologist, author on why institutions must help address growing division in America

November 6, 2025

A Q&A with Anand Pandian, author of the new book Something Between Us, on the physical barriers driving ideological divides and how institutions can help rebuild collective life.

In 2023, when Americans were asked to use one word or phrase to describe politics in the U.S. at the time, at the top of the list were “divisive” and “polarized.” While polarization is often framed as an abstraction, Johns Hopkins anthropologist Anand Pandian argues that it’s not purely ideological. It manifests in tangible ways, too.

In his new book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down, Pandian explores how physical infrastructure has played a role in deepening the ruptures in the U.S. social fabric and strategies to repair them.

In this Q&A, Pandian elaborates on these themes and outlines the specific role institutions and policymakers play in systemically addressing political polarization and rebuilding collective life.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Your book focuses on how infrastructure and the physical barriers we’ve created around us perpetuate isolation and sharpen our ideological divides. What are some of the common physical barriers you found?

I wanted to understand how we’d gotten to this situation of such deep impasses here in the United States. As an anthropologist, I’m trained to pay attention to ideas about what it means to live well, what it means to have a good society, what it means to have a good collective life with other people, and how those notions affect what we do on an everyday basis.

As I began to think about these questions in the wake of the 2016 election, I noticed certain patterns. On the one hand, you had politicians and political candidates at a national level talking about the need to build walls between our country and other countries. But on the other hand, I began to see that walls have been creeping up in all kinds of ways in our daily lives.

Our homes are getting increasingly fortified and isolated from each other. We drive around in ever more massive vehicles that look like armored enclosures on the road. Many people have even come to imagine their own bodies as fortresses that must also be protected from contact with others.

And then there are what I call the ‘walls of the mind,’ or the way in which our social media, news channels, and information ecosystems put us into different silos of ideas and imagination, as though we’re all occupying completely different realities. All these different levels of everyday division, I argue in the book, build on each other, magnify each other, and make it that much more difficult to deal with circumstances of disagreement.

Can you elaborate more on how you see digital platforms, perhaps ironically, being another wall that divides us? At what point did technology seem to stop connecting us and start dividing us? Is there a tipping point in your mind?

I don’t know if there is a tipping point that I can identify in particular. But there’s something about the individualization of contemporary media, the way the feeds that we take in, the content that we see, are so fully individualized, privatized, and atomized that people can be occupying the same physical space and yet be wired into completely different digital universes. That is a new thing, and I think it has consequences for our ability to actually see eye to eye with people that we don’t know that well.

How do you see institutions helping ensure we have the right guardrails on technology so that it connects us instead of isolates us?

First, if our policymakers and institutions were to invest in the creation of publicly owned digital commons that were genuinely committed to the cultivation of meaningful online communities—as organizations like New Public have called for—that would make a big difference, rather than leaving the digital sphere up to companies whose motivation is to profit from the most uncomfortable feelings we have.

Second, our public institutions should ensure that the large platforms that currently dominate our digital public sphere make adequate investments in maintenance and moderation, which is something that we’re seeing them actually step away from right now. So much hinges on not only simply throwing people together, but ensuring that the conditions of their experience together are healthy, robust, engaging, and inviting. Online communities need people to take care of the quality of engagement and to help steward an effective conversation that is more geared toward a meaningful exploration of differences rather than one in which outliers get hounded out of the room, which happens so easily in our digital spaces.

Companies are feeding our sense of fear, anxiety, and discomfort because we’re relying solely on them for our digital connectivity. If there were a genuine public commitment to making meaningful interchange possible across lines of difference, then I think you’d see a very different kind of internet, and we’d begin to see a different spirit of exchange.

So how do these physical divides end up affecting our ability to establish trust with one another and connect across ideological differences?

One of the things I learned over these last few years, talking to hundreds of different people in more than a dozen states around the country for this book, was how little interaction many people have with others, especially strangers, on a daily basis.

The built architecture of many American neighborhoods used to sustain and encourage interactions with people that you didn’t know that well. But around the country, we see a retreat from those forms of everyday engagement with our neighbors and others. There’s a profound difference between living in a neighborhood that has a vibrant, interactive culture, and living in a place where you can spend days without really seeing anyone else or anyone you don’t know.

When there’s less interaction with people we don’t know well, people are likely to grow more suspicious of the very value of doing that to begin with. They’ll also question whether they can share their space with people they don’t have that much in common with, and whether they can talk at all with people whose ideas are different from their own. And yet we need these kinds of everyday bridges in our social life.

These barriers obviously don’t appear overnight. How did we get here, and what role did institutions play in sustaining them?

We can think about this on all kinds of scales. Nearly 1 in 5 American homes in a residential community is secured now by community walls or fences, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. There are powerful ideas about personal safety and security that have enabled the development of these private communities, but we need to think about the social difficulties that they can pose.

On a more intimate scale, think of technologies like doorbell cameras. They’re designed to protect us and give us assurance and security once again, but they can also end up deepening suspicions. The simple act of opening the door to see who might have knocked can become fraught with a kind of uncertainty that it didn’t use to have.

Or think of the way automobiles dominate our public space in the U.S. and all the regulatory bodies and structures that have accommodated this dominance. Our streets are now overrun by such massive vehicles that people in many places are anxious about walking down the street in the absence of sidewalks, allowing their children to walk to school, or considering cycling instead of driving.

Then take our media, and the way that the Federal Communications Commission suspended the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s, which had mandated that radio stations present politically balanced programming. This move allowed for the development of purely partisan news media that broadcast particular viewpoints to those who find them appealing, as opposed to broader messaging and forms of communication. That is one way our regulatory agencies are responsible for the deeply partisan nature of our contemporary media.

All of these things have policy and regulatory backdrops to them, and unless our civic leaders and policymakers are actively committed to nurturing spaces that are indeed truly open to diverse experiences and perspectives, and people of diverse backgrounds, we’re going to keep seeing these silos.

Overcoming these silos is often framed as an individual responsibility to broaden one’s perspective and seek out people who are different than you. What are the limits to framing this task of rebuilding collective life as a personal one?

What we do as individuals does matter in a democratic society, but it can’t solely be up to us as individuals to fix these problems. It isn’t enough simply to ask people to talk to other people and try out more challenging conversations, when the circumstances of our everyday lives make these things so unusual and daunting. In doing these things as a researcher, what I learned is that we need change at an infrastructural level.

When we consider contemporary patterns of isolation and separation in the U.S., we have to think about the country’s long history of residential segregation by race and class and other ways people have been set apart from others unlike themselves. These divisions have longstanding policy coordinates and deep institutional roots, so they require institutional attention.

Without serious investment in the kinds of social infrastructures that will put us into more meaningful contact with others with different histories and backgrounds, this proposition to engage in more uncomfortable interactions or challenging encounters will feel too difficult and intimidating for most people.

What are some of the investments or institutional actions that would make the biggest difference?

I think our institutions have a responsibility to create, sustain, maintain, and nurture public spaces—like parks, libraries, trails, sidewalks—where people of different backgrounds can come together and share a social life. These kinds of physical spaces affect how comfortable people are in the company of strangers and whether they’re able to imagine sharing a life with people who are different from them. Organizations like Reimagining the Civic Commons are bringing together civic institutions, both public and private, in many cities around the country to help make that possible.

But our universities and other educational institutions also have a crucial role to play here by encouraging public reflection and sharing essential knowledge, ideally in ways that people outside of academia can also understand and appreciate.

This isn’t the first time the U.S. has been confronted with intense political and ideological division. When looking at the past, what were the ingredients that helped push America toward unity? How might the solutions to today’s divisions look similar, and how might they be distinct?

My book pays attention to how generations of struggle for racial and social justice in the U.S. have depended on the ability of people to organize across deep social divides: how they built alliances, coalitions, and bridges for a more inclusive picture of what this country is and what this country could be. Those legacies matter, and they have a great deal to teach us about what remains possible in this country now.

The challenges today are new. Certain contemporary developments in the physical makeup of our lives bring separation down to a really intimate and difficult scale. I think that has something to do with the newly sharpened forms of polarization that we see. But when we think about what it means to wrestle with these new challenges, we can build on these older legacies of organizing, coalition-building, and developing other kinds of alliances in the name of a broader vision of American community.

How can policymakers apply research from your book to their work to help improve the way Americans engage one another?

I think people in positions of power and institutional authority could pay better attention to the everyday circumstances that divide their constituents from each other. They could pay better attention to the forms of isolation that people in their communities experience on a daily basis and think about creating spaces and opportunities to bring people together in more meaningful ways.

If you really want to find ways of reconciling different perspectives on the world, you have to first pay attention to whether the people with those different perspectives are in relationship with each other at all. That’s an important foundation for the kind of reconciliation a lot of people are looking for right now.

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