In October 2020, APSA awarded the inaugural APSA Diversity and Inclusion Advancing Research Grants 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 $5000 and the Research Advancement for Indigenous Politics Grant will support six research projects for a combined total award amount of $10,500.     

Read about the funded research projects below.

Early Career Scholar Grant: 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.

Researcher Biographies

Jamil Scott, Georgetown University

Jamil Scott is an assistant professor of Government at Georgetown University. She received her doctorate from Michigan State University in political science and her bachelor’s degree from University of Maryland, College Park in psychology and government & politics. She is a past recipient of the King-Chavez Park Future Faculty Fellowship as well as co-PI on a grant form the New America Foundation.  Her research has been published in Politics, Groups, and Identities and American Politics Research, among other peer reviewed journals. She is currently working on her book length manuscript in which she seeks to understand Black women’s candidate emergence in state level politics. 

Daniel Solomon, Georgetown University

Daniel Solomon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. His dissertation research centers on pogroms, defined as relatively brief episodes of multiple violent acts against people and physical structures associated with a select social community, by an informal group but involving some pattern of state complicity. Drawing on both cross-case comparisons and within-case analysis of violence during pogrom episodes in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Nazi Germany, he uses qualitative process tracing to study how pogrom organizers mobilize violence against targeted groups and multivariate regression analysis of historical data to explain why pogroms result in group-selective violence in some locations, but not others.

Kelebogile Zvobgo, The College of William & Mary

Kelebogile Zvobgo is founder and director of the International Justice Lab at William & Mary and a PhD candidate in political science and international relations at the University of Southern California. Her research is published in International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Human Rights, among other peer-reviewed journals, and popular-press outlets like Foreign Policy Magazine and The Washington Post.

Indigenous Politics Grant: Are there Diminishing Marginal Returns to Descriptive Representation? Indigenous Groups and Subnational Office in the Americas

Researcher Biography

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.

Indigenous Politics Grant: Subverting Nature: Indigenous and Afro-Columbian Responses to Elite Republicanism in New Granada

Researcher Biography

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, entitled “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 thirty 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.

Indigenous Politics Grant: Voting by Mail in Indian Country

Researcher Biography

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.

Indigenous Politics Grant: Coproduction of Health Care for Indigenous Women: Evaluating a Medical Intervention in the Great Chaco Region

Researcher Biography 

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 co-editor of a Cambridge University Press Series on Politics and Society in Latin America, and editorial board member of numerous academic journals. She is proud to have co-founded 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 Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University.

Indigenous Politics Grant: Who Supports Mascots and Tribal Sovereignty? Public Opinion on Native American Policy Issues

Researcher Biography

Dr. Raymond Foxworth serves as vice president of grantmaking, 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 U.S. 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 Ph.D. in political science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Raymond is a citizen of the Navajo Nation, originally from Tuba City, Arizona.

Indigenous Politics Grant: Creating an Indigenous Studies Dataverse 

Researcher Biographies

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, 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 co-author 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 co-editing 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.