In June 2022, APSA awarded 6 projects for the APSA Diversity and Inclusion Advancing Research Grant for Early Career Scholars for a combined total award amount of $12,000. Read about the funded research projects below.

Ayana Best, Howard University

Project Title: Voices Unheard, Stories Untold: Black Women, Police Violence and Political Participation 

Ayana Best earned her Ph.D. in political science and international relations at the University of Southern California. Her research primarily focuses on the effects of state-sanctioned violence on Black women’s political participation and civic engagement. She previously held a research position at the USC Center for Feminist Research, working on projects addressing homelessness for women of color in California, and with the California Black redistricting Hub providing policy analysis that informs strategic priorities and planning related to redistricting in the Black community. She will be joining the faculty at Howard University as an Assistant Professor in the Fall.

Shauna Gillooly, College of William and Mary  

Project Title: Mobilizing Against Ecocide in Comparative Contexts

Shauna Gillooly received her PhD in political science at the University of California, Irvine in September 2021. Shauna received her B.S. (with honors) in international affairs & Spanish language from Florida State University in 2016, and her M.A. in political science from the University of California, Irvine in 2018. Her past work has focused on social movement transitions to political parties in Latin America, as well as the impact of political violence legacies on voter behavior. Her previous work has been published in academic journals such as PS: Political Science and Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, The Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, and PLOS ONE. It has appeared in media outlets such as The Washington Post and The Conversation, and policy-focused platforms such as E-International Relations. She is currently a Leading Edge Post-doctoral Fellow with Sembrando Sentido via the American Council of Learned Societies and the Carnegie Foundation, a visiting researcher with Instituto PENSAR at the Pontifica Unviersidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, and an Expert with the UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab. In August 2022, she will begin a position as a Post doctoral Researcher on the TRIP Survey Project housed in the Global Research Institute at William & Mary in Virginia, USA.  

Takiyah Harper-Shipman, Davidson College

 Project Title: Suturing Racial Capitalism and Reproduction 

T.D. Harper-Shipman is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Her first book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (2019) was published with Routledge Press. She has published in Third World Quarterly, the Journal of Asian and African Studies, Philosophy and Global Affairs, and International Studies Review. Some of her public-facing work appears in Africa is a Country, Pambazuka, and the Miami Institute for the Social Science (MISS). She received her PhD in political science from the University of Connecticut. She is interested in race and gender manifest in international development discourse and political economy in Africa.

Gabriele Magni, Loyola Marymount University

Project Title: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer candidates: Running for office and winning elections

Gabriele Magni is Assistant Professor of political science and Director of the Global Policy Institute at Loyola Marymount University. His research examines issues of diversity, inclusion and political representation in advanced democracies. One stream of his work focuses on sexual orientation and gender identity and explores the experiences of LGBTQ politicians and electoral candidates. Another stream analyzes how economic inequality and hardship affect preferences for redistribution, immigration attitudes, and voting behavior. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science, among other outlets. He has also written for The Washington Post, Politico and The New Republic and he has provided commentary to The New York Times, The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, NBC News, and Reuters.

Adaugo Pamela Nwakanma, Harvard University

Project Title: Women, Power and Networks: The Gendered Politics of Economic Empowerment

Adaugo Pamela Nwakanma is a Leading Edge Fellow at the American Council for Learned Societies. She earned her Ph.D. from the department of government with a secondary field in the department of African and African American studies at Harvard University. Amongst other activities, she researches and teaches on the political economy of gender and development in various emerging economies with particular emphasis on the African context and the African diaspora. Her published work has appeared in journals such as Perspectives on Politics and Politics, Groups, and Identities (forthcoming), as well as edited volumes such as the Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies and Routledge's African Scholars and Intellectuals in the North American Academy: Reflections of Exile and Migration. Her interdisciplinary research thus far has won awards from the American Political Science Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Prior to her doctoral studies, Nwakanma worked as an Urban Education Fellow and Vice-HBO Translator in New York City. She received her B.A in international studies-economics with a secondary field in linguistics from the University of California, San Diego in 2014.

Jasmine Noelle Yarish, University of the District of Columbia

Project Title: Reconstructing Home: Abolition Democracy, the City, and Black Feminist Political Thought Revisited 

Dr. Jasmine Noelle Yarish is an Assistant Professor of political science in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of the District of Columbia. Dr. Yarish’s expertise is in the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and democratic theory. Her research aims to extend the idea of abolition democracy theorized by W.E.B. Du Bois to include political and intellectual contributions made by black women during the era of Reconstruction in the mid to late nineteenth century. Her archival commitments to revisiting that early period of contemporary political thought, the primary democratization period in American political development, and the unique case of Philadelphia in rethinking the significance of Reconstruction for the discipline of political science place Dr. Noelle Yarish’s scholarship prominently in the growing literature on the “Third Reconstruction.”