p-adic Hodge-theoretic properties of \'etale cohomology with mod p coefficients, and the cohomology of Shimura varieties

We show that the mod p cohomology of a smooth projective variety with semistable reduction over K, a finite extension of Qp, embeds into the reduction modulo p of a semistable Galois representation with Hodge-Tate weights in the expected range (at least after semisimplifying, in the case of the cohomological degree > 1). We prove refinements with descent data, and we apply these results to the cohomology of unitary Shimura varieties, deducing vanishing results and applications to the weight part of Serre’s conjecture.