In October 2020 APSA awarded the inaugural APSA Diversity and Inclusion Research Advancement Awards to research projects in the following areas: Early Career Scholars and Indigenous Politics. A total of seven awards were made. This year the Research Advancement for Early Career Scholars Grant will support one research project in the amount of $5,000 and the Research Advancement for Indigenous Politics Grant will support six research projects for a combined total award amount of $10,500.
The new research advancement grants are a fulfillment of the APSA Diversity and Inclusion Program’s strategic plan to expand the reach of APSA’s support for the advancement of scholars from underrepresented groups and for research that examines political science phenomena affecting underserved communities and underrepresented groups. The new grants will complement APSA’s existing diversity and inclusion fellowships and grants—namely the APSA Diversity Fellowship Program (DFP) (formerly known as the Minority Fellowship Program, MFP), the Lee Ann Fujii APSA Diversity Fellowship Travel Grant, and the Fund For Latino Scholarship—providing additional research funding opportunities for scholars at multiple points in their professional careers. Read more about the awardees and their research projects below.
EARLY CAREER SCHOLARS GRANT
Research Team: Dr. Jamil S. Scott, assistant professor, Department of Government, Georgetown University; Daniel Solomon, PhD student, Department of Government, Georgetown University; Kelebogile Zvobgo, predoctoral fellow, Global Research Institute, The College of William & Mary; PhD candidate, Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of South California.
Project Title: Racial Violence and Public Attitudes Towards Justice
Project Description: Is the public’s knowledge of racial violence associated with support for justice? What might racial justice look like? Scholarship on violence in comparative politics and international relations demonstrates that personal exposure to violence shapes individual political attitudes, for example, by decreasing political tolerance and decreasing trust in government. But little work examines how knowledge of past violence against a racial minority group influences support for different remedies, such reparations and memorials, for the group. Even less work considers how knowledge of contemporary violence against a racial minority group influences support for remedies. As the United States experiences social and political unrest in the wake of new violence against Black, Indigenous, People of Color—in the midst of a deadly pandemic—it is vital that scholars discern the conditions under which citizens support restitution for past and present harms. To address this urgent question, we will conduct a series of state-level survey experiments across the US on public support for various measures being proposed by elected officials, social leaders, and victims’ families in response to historical and contemporary racial violence. The first of these is a survey on racial-terror lynchings in Maryland, where legislators have created a truth commission on the subject. In addition to the experimental data, we will draw on qualitative data from life histories with descendants of lynching victims and interviews with civil society groups and policy makers. This project also provides a research training experience for Black undergraduates from Maryland, who will help conduct the life-history interviews. Our goal is to advance knowledge of legacies of racial violence, while implementing an innovative model of cross-subfield, cross-institutional, and mixed-method collaborative research.
INDIGENOUS POLITICS GRANTS
Recipient: Christopher Carter
Project Title: Are there Diminishing Marginal Returns to Descriptive Representation? Indigenous Groups and Subnational Office in the Americas
Dr. Christopher Carter is an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University and a research associate at the Center on the Politics of Development at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as co-organizer, moderator, and presenter for the 2020 Indigenous Studies and Political Science Mini-Conference held at the 2020 APSA Virtual Annual Meeting. In his book project, he examines the emergence as well as the political and social effects of Indigenous autonomy in the Americas. This project won the 2020 APSA Best Fieldwork Award. He has also published work on local governance in Latin America, methods for causal inference, and the regulation of gig economy labor in the United States. His work employs a multi-method approach, using experimental and natural experimental data as well as extensive interviewing and archival research. Chris received his PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. He completed a Master’s in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge as a Gates-Cambridge scholar, and he holds a BA in political science and history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied as a Morehead-Cain scholar.
Recipient: Arturo Chang
Project Title: Subverting Nature: Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Responses to Elite Republicanism in New Granada
Arturo Chang is a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Williams College and a PhD candidate at Northwestern University. His primary research is situated in comparative political theory with an emphasis on Indigenous studies, post-colonial movements, as well as race and ethnic studies. His dissertation, titled “Imagining America: International Commiseration and National Revolution in the Modern Post-Colony,” traces the emergence of what he calls Pan-American Discourse, a hemispheric vernacular of revolutionary change that connected more than 30 popular republican movements during the Age of Revolutions (c. 1775–1830). His project analyzes cases in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and the United States to demonstrate that Pan-American Discourse was deployed by Indigenous, Black, and Mestizo revolutionaries to legitimize demands for egalitarian reforms such as communal land protections, civic equality, and the abolition of slavery. Arturo’s research on marginalized communities in the Americas has been supported by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at Northwestern University, and Williams College. His research on public opinion and populism during the 2016 presidential election, with Thomas Ferguson, Benjamin I. Page, Jacob Rothschild, and Jie Chen, has appeared in the International Journal of Political Economy.
Recipient: Joseph Dietrich
Project Title: Voting by Mail in Indian Country
Dr. Joseph Dietrich is a researcher at Claremont Graduate University and is on the Department of Political Science teaching faculty at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. His work primarily focuses on political behavior, voting rights, issues of race and the political system, as well as the politics and policy of education. He has published his work in several well-respected journals such as Politics, Groups, and Identities and Social Science Quarterly. Dr. Dietrich has also been an expert witness and offered testimony in several recent voting rights matters involving Native Americans. He was the co-organizer of the 2020 APSA Virtual Annual Meeting Mini-Conference titled “Indigenous Studies and Political Science: Reconsidering Nation, Representation, and Citizenship.” Dr. Dietrich organized two events at the conference attempting to connect legal scholars, attorneys, advocates, and academics working on Native American voting rights with each other in order to discuss their practice.
Recipient: Tulia Falleti
Project Title: Coproduction of Health Care for Indigenous Women: Evaluating a Medical Intervention in the Great Chaco Region.
Dr. Tulia G. Falleti is the Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science, Director of the Latin American and Latinx Studies Program, and Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research lies at the intersection of political institutions and public policy analysis. Falleti’s scholarship contributes to five interrelated areas: 1) decentralization of government, federalism, and subnational governance; 2) local civic engagement and participatory institutions; 3) historical institutionalism and qualitative research methods, in particular process tracing and the comparative sequential method; 4) health systems’ reforms and state-society coproduction of health services; and 5) Indigenous politics. Connecting themes is a common interest in the distributive effects of institutions and public policies and their contribution to social mobilization and political change. At present, Falleti is working on a comparative research project on the articulation of Indigenous peoples’ rights and demands in contexts of environmental degradation, and collaborating with two non-governmental health organizations to assess the effectiveness of coproduction of health care for Indigenous pregnant women in remote rural areas. Falleti is coeditor of a Cambridge University Press Series on Politics and Society in Latin America and an editorial board member of numerous academic journals. She is proud to have cofounded the Penn Model OAS Program, which serves underrepresented minority high school students of the greater Philadelphia area, and to have contributed to the strengthening of the Latin American and Latinx Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Falleti received her bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Buenos Aires and her PhD in political science from Northwestern University.
Recipient: Raymond Foxworth
Project Title: Who Supports Mascots and Tribal Sovereignty? Public Opinion on Native American Policy Issues
Dr. Raymond Foxworth serves as vice president of grantmak- ing, development and communications at First Nations Development Institute. First Nations is a Native American-led nonprofit organization that supports economic and community development efforts in Native American communities. His research interests include Indigenous representation, self-governance and political behavior in the US and Latin America. His work also explores the political attitudes of settler societies toward Indigenous populations. He was a panelist on the APSA Diversity and Inclusion Roundtable on Emerging Research from the Field of Indigenous Politics. Dr. Foxworth holds a BA and MA in political science. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Raymond is a citizen of the Navajo Nation, originally from Tuba City, Arizona.
Recipients: Rick Witmer and Fred Boehmke
Project Title: Creating an Indigenous Studies Dataverse
Dr. Rick Witmer is the Rev. John P. Schlegel, SJ, Distinguished Professor of Government and Politics in the Department of Political Science at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. His teaching interests include American Indian politics, law, and policy as well as American government and public policy. His research interests focus on Indigenous politics and policy at the state and federal level including Indian gaming, Native healthcare policy, and Indigenous political participation. Dr. Witmer was a panelist on the APSA Diversity and Inclusion Roundtable on Emerging Research from the Field of Indigenous Politics. He is coauthor of Forced Federalism: Contemporary Challenges to Indigenous Nationhood. His work has appeared in numerous journals including the Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, Politics, Groups and Identities, and the Indigenous Policy Journal. He currently serves as the chair of the Indigenous Studies Network, an APSA related group, and is coediting a special issue of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics focusing on Indigenous politics.
Dr. Fred Boehmke is a professor of political science at the University of Iowa and Director of the Iowa Social Science Research Center in the Public Policy Center. His research focuses on political methodology and American politics, including work on state policy, the initiative process, organized interests, and Native American politics.
PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICS CALL FOR PAPERS:
BLACK LIVES MATTER SPECIAL ISSUE
Following the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, among others, Black Lives Matter (BLM) is once again at the center of American politics. It is widespread, diverse, and the protests it leads have broad popular support according to public opinion polling. History suggests that protest is essential to the health of democracies. The most effective protests force the political establishment to enact policy reforms that benefit an aggrieved party, typically a marginalized group. Even when movements fail, protests often put grievances on the public agenda for a sustained period of time. Having said this, seven years after its founding in the aftermath of the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin, BLM has achieved some major successes. If the diversity of the recent protests is any indication, BLM has the potential to change the way that Americans deal with race and racism, and offers the chance to correct for the past failures of American society to address race-based injustice.
With this in mind, Perspectives on Politics calls for submission of papers for a special issue, the purpose of which is to explore the state of BLM, its impact, and its potential ramifications. The editors encourage papers from a range of perspectives, subfields, and approaches within the discipline. Christopher Sebastian Parker of the University of Washington will serve as Guest Editor for this special issue.
SUBMISSIONS DUE: MAY 31, 2021
For more details, see the full Call for Papers at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/call-for-papers-black-lives-matter-special-issue
