A graduate student is studying a community with high rates of unemployment and a long history of racial tension. She collects, counts, and analyzes news stories in the area that focus on rarely occurring events, such as school shootings, and compares these to the prevalence of stories concerning the economic and cultural issues of the community. The researcher is conducting a study that is most centrally drawing on?

Gramsci's concept of hegemony

Explanation: Hegemony, to Gramsci, is the “cultural, moral and ideological” leadership of a group over allied and subaltern groups.

Gramsci believed that the leading role of the dominant class must include ideology and consciousness, that is, the superstructure. The location of cultural, ideological, and intellectual variables as fundamental for the proletariat in its struggle to become a leading class is Gramsci’s main contribution to Marxist theory. With it, the Italian intellectual sought to undermine the economic determinism of historical materialism. He was acknowledging that human beings had a high degree of agency in history: human will and intellect played a role as fundamental as the economy.