Rethinking What's True

Lilah Shapiro teaches students to question how they know what they know

Faye Berger (BS23) was dreading a required SESP class that tackles the hairy issue of what it means “to know.” Days before her first journal assignment was due, she was near tears. “My brain just doesn’t work like that,” Berger told instructor Lilah Shapiro.

Shapiro firmly dismissed her concerns. She encouraged Berger to do the assignment in her own way, then offered extensive, evenhanded feedback. After every class, Shapiro checked in and offered to meet, for as long or as briefly as Berger needed.

“She made me eager to learn,” says Berger, who went on to take two more of Shapiro’s classes and serve as her research assistant. “She worded her thoughts on my work in such a way that I was not just proud of it; I was excited to tackle the next assignment and do even better.”

It’s a common sentiment among students who have taken Shapiro’s classes, worked with her on research projects, or completed senior honors theses under her careful guidance. In a world shaped by divisive social media, misinformation, and political polarization, Shapiro helps students think carefully and critically about complicated topics, from gun ownership and religion to antisemitism.

“She taught me to challenge everything, and that all knowledge is constructed, an idea I initially struggled with,” Berger says. “Now I take it into every situation I face.”

Research that doesn’t happen

Shapiro, a sociologist and the Charles Deering McCormick Instructor of Excellence, studies belief systems large and small. Her research is timely and relevant, always involves. students, and often touches cultural flashpoints. In 2021 she received a Provost’s Grant for Research in Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts to explore gun owners’ relationships with religion and faith. Why, she wondered, do some people believe that owning a gun makes them safer even when data says otherwise?

“We tend to think of ourselves as rational and evidence- based individuals,” Shapiro says. “But it often doesn’t matter how much data somebody is presented with. They’re going to believe what they need to believe so their world makes sense to them.”

She paused that research in 2022 after a gunman opened fire during an Independence Day parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, killing seven people. Her husband had been standing just feet from one of the victims, and Shapiro knew two of those killed and many who were injured.

“I tell students about the factors that shape the research that happens—and the research that doesn’t,” she says. “Sometimes the most urgent and important work gets set aside or reshaped because of personal, political, or environmental fac­tors.” Though she still draws on insights from the sidelined work when she teaches, “I had to step away. I wasn’t in the right headspace.”

Antisemitism: In the eye of the beholder?

Shapiro’s next project, though, was informed in part by public responses to the shootings. She had already begun exploring what gets labeled as antisemi­tism and who gets to define it, topics that students debated in class. While the dese­cration of a Jewish cemetery is a clear-cut example, she says, some considered the Highland Park shootings antisemitic because many of the victims were Jewish. She disagrees.

“People interpret and experience antisemitism differently depending on their background,” she says. “I’m trying to understand how and why people think about it the way they do. That’s crucial if the broader goal is to combat all forms of social prejudice, not just antisemitism.”

She initially planned to interview Jewish and non-Jewish students and intentionally recruit students from groups like Students for Justice in Pal­estine and NU Community Not Cops— groups that have both been accused of antisemitism. By including their views, she hoped people could get a better, fuller understanding of how antisemi­tism is understood and felt by a wide range of people.

This bigger picture might also help open the door to import­ant conversations among different groups, she says. But when Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, she redesigned the research to account for heightened emotional and political tensions.

“I hope this research can help find areas of misunderstanding or knowledge gaps,” she says. “That might allow for more productive dialogue both within and across groups. Moving beyond group-based, polarized thinking is crucial for learning.”

Empowering students

Shapiro is known for instilling confidence and bringing out a love of research in her students that they often didn’t know they had. “She sounded so unflinchingly cer­tain that I would succeed that it made me believe it myself,” says Sumaia Masoom (BS18), who now works at Visa.

Since 2012 Shapiro has sponsored 84 student applications for undergraduate research grants; of these, 69 were success­ful. Every year she advises multiple senior honors thesis students; last year she worked with five. She excels as a research mentor because she’s willing to invest in teaching undergraduates about the research process, says Megan Wood, associate director of the Office of Under­graduate Research.

“It isn’t about how her own research area aligns to the undergraduate’s interests,” Wood says. “She knows that mentorship is about teaching elements of research like how to write a research question, how to scope a project into something achievable, and how to support her mentees when their projects don’t go according to plan.”

The invisible green goblin

In another life Shapiro, a qualitative sociologist, might have been a long-form podcaster. Unlike quantitative researchers, who analyze numerical data, she focuses on stories and meaning. “People are fascinating,” she says. “My job is to figure out what makes them tick and how they make meaning in their life.” 

After earning undergraduate degrees in English and vocal performance from Oberlin College, Shapiro completed her doctorate in comparative human development at the University of Chicago. During a 2011 fellowship at the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, she began to explore the gap between how people think they make sense of the world and what they actually do, and this divide still shapes her work today.

In her signature course, Understanding Knowledge, she asks what it means to know, how knowledge is produced, and who gets to define it. She challenges students to examine how they know what they know and how to engage thoughtfully with such ideas as conspiracy theories and extremism. Topics range from the Flat Earth Society to vaccine skepticism and the theory of relativity.

Social policy major Juniper Shelly recalls how, in the first class of the quarter, Shapiro dropped a pen and asked students why it fell. When they chorused “gravity,” she responded, “How do you know it isn’t an invisible green goblin pulling it to the ground? Can anyone prove that’s not true?” Shelly was initially skeptical. “I knew it was gravity—science has proven it,” she says. But as the course progressed, she saw Shapiro’s deeper message: that many established truths are shaped by belief in the scientific method and faith in “experts.”

The course was also unique because Shapiro encouraged students to examine the role played by their own identities, biases, and assumptions in creating knowledge. Through debate and diverse readings, “Professor Shapiro expanded my mind,” Shelly says. “She made us take on perspectives we didn’t agree with and pointed out the way our like-mindedness shielded us from having challenging conversations about politics and identity. She presented debates that seemed foreign to many of us, like the notion that science is a human-made creation, comparable to religion. The rational way she laid out arguments that many of us would have easily dismissed helped open my mind.”

SESP undergraduate Catherine James loved the class so much that she now brings prospective students to sit in when she gives campus tours. “Some even join the discussion,” says James, who is studying learning and organizational change.

“I walked away feeling like it changed how I think. She doesn’t sugarcoat anything, and she makes room for opposing views. That helps you grow.”

For Berger, now a strategy analyst at Deloitte, the last day of class was one of the most memorable. Shapiro, also a classically trained musician, stood in front of her 30 students and sang parts of the farewell song “For Good” from Wicked , whose lyrics describe meeting someone who changes your life.

“Professor Shapiro was that person for me,” Berger says. “She challenged me and every student in her class to chase our curiosities. She motivated me to seek answers to questions I didn’t know I had. And she fundamentally changed the way I think about the world and my position in it.”

--By Julie Deardorff