PARCC Faculty Affiliates

 
Steven Brechin, Professor of Sociology, Maxwell School, is interested in understanding the range of organizational models that exist for the protection of natural areas and biodiversity.  In his current work, he uses the theoretical lens of the “hollow state” to explore the unique partnership between government and NGOs that has evolved in Belize to manage protected areas throughout the country, and its implications for public engagement, governance, and the goals of conservation.  Brechin also researcher how individuals and groups think about and support a variety of environmental issues including climate change.

 Stuart Bretschneider is the Associate Dean and Chair of the Department of Public Administration at the Maxwell School.  He has published prolifically on diverse topics such as information management in public organizations; technology transfer and the diffusion of new technology; and administrative delay and red tape in public organizations.  Throughout his career, he has worked on aspects of integrating the use of technology into government: its effect on administration, collaboration, and public participation.  Dr. Bretschneider is currently working on a collaborative network experiment aimed to discover how and when information is diffused between and across organizations. Collaborative Research Areas: Interorganizational Collaboration; Groups and Individuals in Networks.

Matthew Cleary is an Associate Professor of Political Science. Cleary’s work focuses on the variations in the capacity of Mexican citizens to confront and sway municipal-level governments, and on pro- and anti-autonomy indigenous rights activists.
 
Bruce Dayton is Adjunct Assistant Professor, Political Science and Assistant Director of the Global Affairs Institute. At the Moynihan Institute Dayton heads research projects on transboundary crisis management, human security, and the de-escalation of violent intrastate conflict. He also serves as the Executive Director of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP), an international academic society with nearly one-thousand members across the globe dedicated to examining the relationship between political and psychological phenomena. He also focuses on the management of crises across state and national boundaries, many of which have an environmental dimension.

Miriam Elman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and one of the Faculty Research Directors of International and Intra-state Conflicts at the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC).  She is also the Director of the Project on Democracy in the Middle East (DIME) at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs and a member of the Advisory Board and Steering Committees for the Judaic Studies Program, the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism (INSCT), and the Middle Eastern Studies Program.

Kirk Emerson is a Professor of Practice in Collaborative Governance at the School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona. Her recent research and practice have focused on collaborative governance and climate change, border security and natural resources.

Catherine Gerard serves as Director of the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration.  In that role, she manages the Executive Master of Public Administration (EMPA) degree program, serves as graduate course professor for the Department of Public Administration, and designs and delivers executive education programs for domestic and international customers.  Throughout her career, she has focused on leadership and training for management roles.  She has consulted with public and non-profit organizations in the areas of leadership/management, organizational change, team-building and conflict resolution, labor-management partnerships, strategic planning, and total quality management.  She recently completed a major facilitation project for the Salvation Army, and is currently working on an empirical study of collaboration at senior levels of the federal government. Collaborative Research Area: Groups and Individuals in Networks.

Cecilia Green is an Associate Professor of Sociology. Professor Green has been involved for over thirty years in various activist projects, including some on far trade, on environmentally-oriented cultural groups in Dominica, on the Bags Across the Globe movement, and the Haiti Solidarity Group. She is currently envisioning a project to link art and environment in Syracuse and the Caribbean, and bringing together "thinkers" and activists working on issues of global trade/globalization.
 
Paul Hirsch is part of an international, interdisciplinary team working to develop an “Integrative Framework” for understanding the various tradeoffs that occur between environmental conservation and economic development.  Locally, Hirsch is researching the conflict surrounding the method of natural gas drilling known as hydraulic fracturing.  While many are deeply concerned about potential threats to regional watersheds, others see drilling as a benefit to local landowners and the New York economy.  Hirsch is exploring the extent to which framing hydraulic fracturing as a tradeoff problem can facilitate more productive dialog and deliberative decision making for an issue in which there is currently a great deal of polarization and one-sidedness.

Azra Hromadzic is a cultural anthropologist with research interests in the anthropology of international policy in the context of peace-building and democratization.   Her research focuses on the nature of citizenship and nationhood for youth in Bosnia and Herzegovina and two additional projects.  The first project is a study in the anthropology of displacement, and it addresses key questions: Why do people reconcile past conflicts while living in “exile”?  And how do the experiences of refugees in their place of settlement as well as their diasporic connections shape these processes of displaced reconciliation?  The second project will investigate the emerging economies of morality in the context of post-conflict democratization. 

Neil Katz was the founder and director of the Program in Nonviolent Conflict and Change and co-founder of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC) and associate professor of Social Science and Public Affairs.  He is the author of over 35 books, articles and book chapters on conflict resolution, interest-based negotiation, mediation, and nonviolent action, and is a board member of national organizations. He is a mediator, a process consultant, a facilitator, and a trainer/consultant in organizational leadership, conflict resolution and negotiation skills for business, government, education, and community groups. 

Soonhee Kim’s research and teaching interests include public management, human resources management, electronic government, local governance, and leadership development.  Her current research projects examine globalization and its impact on local government collaborative leadership and management capacity building strategies for enhancing transparency, citizen participation, and accountability, collaborative networks in local governments, e-government performance and leadership, and citizen trust in government in several countries in the Asian region.  Collaborative Research Area: Groups and Individuals in Networks; Participatory Governance; Collaborative Leadership.

 Louis Kriesberg is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Maxwell Professor Emeritus of Social Conflict Studies, and founding director of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (1986–1994), all at Syracuse University.  He has written over 125 book chapters and articles, has published several books.  He was President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1983–1984), and he lectures, consults, and provides training regarding conflict resolution, security issues, and peace studies.

 Prema Kurien is an Associate Professor of Sociology is currently engaged in research on the role of religion in social activism, as well as on Indian American civic and political activism in the U.S.

 John Mathiason uses his extensive career experience at the United Nations to teach distance collaboration and in-person courses in International Public and NGO Management and Evaluation of International Programs and Projects.  As the Managing Director of Associates for International Management Services, an international consulting company, he has provided management training and advisory assistance to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Provisional Technical Secretariat of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, the International Labour Organization and numerous UN agencies.  His research interests are focused on means of improving the management of the international public sector.

 Ines Mergel’s research focuses on (online and offline) informal social networks among public managers.  In her research program, she studies the use of collaborative technologies, such as Wikis, Second Life, etc. and the need for interorganizational collaborative capacity building activities in the public sector. She is using both qualitative and quantitative social network analysis techniques. She maintains a blog covering the latest developments in networked governance. Her publications cover topics such as the diffusion and adoption of new media; Web 2.0 and social networking applications in government; and practical uses of networks throughout the public sphere. Collaborative Research Area: Informal social networks among government professionals.

Alison Mountz, Associate Professor of Geography, is currently looking at how states are 'offshoring' asylum, hiding people who are trying to reach their shores from view in detention centers in remote locations such as islands. The work has an important advocacy component which involves collaboration with organizations advocating for and visiting people in detention. Locally, that includes the Task Force on Detention, and nationally, the Detention Watch Network, and international coalitions on detention as well.

Tina Nabatchi’s research interests include public management, public policy, and law, particularly in relation to citizen participation and deliberation, collaborative governance, and conflict resolution. Her research examines both theory and practice, and uses both quantitative and qualitative methods for evaluation. She is interested in the roles that citizens can and do play in the work of government. To that end, she is empirically evaluating the effects of participation on the civic skills and dispositions of citizens, and well as how deliberative outcomes are integrated into public action and policy decisions
 
Rosemary O’Leary directs the Collaborative Governance Initiative, overseeing research, initiating E-PARCC, and conducting collaborative trainings.  Her areas of expertise include Public Management, Environmental Policy, Dispute Resolution, and Law.  She focuses specifically on interorganizational collaboration and conflict, as well as collaborative problem-solving.  Her current empirical research aims to discover how collaboration is used by high-level executives in the federal government as a management strategy.
 
Steve Parks is an Associate Professor in Writing for the past ten years has sought to link literacy education with collective community politics, creating a process where writing groups act as a lever to articulate political marginalization and gain greater power. Once a collective identity and agenda is created, he publishes the work through the New City Community Press, and develops educational materials for use by public school teachers, community educators, and neighborhood leaders.

Tom Perreault is an Associate Professor of Geography looks at issues of environmental conflict and indigenous/campesino social mobilization in the Andes.  He is beginning a new project on mine-related water pollution on the Altiplano in Bolivia, and its social impacts for indigenous and campesino communities downstream from mining areas.  One big part of this will be looking at the organizing strategies of a recently formed grassroots network composed of over 80 communities affected by mining.  In addition he has been looking at the irrigators' movement in Bolivia, as well as the contentious politics surrounding natural gas development.

Robert A. Rubinstein is a Professor of Anthropology and International Relations at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University Syracuse University. From July 1994-June 2005 he directed the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts at the Maxwell School. Rubinstein is an anthropologist with expertise in political and medical anthropology and in social science history and research methods.

Herbert Ruffin is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies is a historian of Black suburbanization, Black political thought and community development in the Silicon Valley and the Bay Area.

Hans-Peter Schmitz, Associate Professor of Political Science focuses on the institutionalized side of activism, and how those NGOs deal with challenges of leadership, accountability, transparency.  Through the TNGO initiative, he researches rights-based approaches and the expanding rights of indigenous communities.

Susan Senecah is a professor of the State University of New York’s Environmental Science and Forestry school, Dr. Susan Senecah’s research interests focus on the intersection of public participation and environmental policy.  In particular, she studies communication aspects of public participation in the formation of environmental public policy decisions, especially the origins, dynamics, persuasive strategies, and tactics of environmental campaigns.
 
David Van Slyke is a public and nonprofit management specialist.  His research areas focus on public and nonprofit management topics including government contracting, public-private partnerships, strategic management, government-business relations, and policy implementation.  Professor Van Slyke works with several federal agencies, state and local governments, and nonprofits on government contracting and strategic management issues. 

Bradford Vivian is an Assistant Professor in Communication and Rhetorical Studies with an interest in research in rhetorical theory and criticism. His current research includes two ongoing projects: one on the rhetoric of “public forgetting” (as opposed to conventional public memory) and one on models of freedom and citizenship in the history of rhetorical theory.

 Jamie Winders is an Associate Professor of Geography is working on a book on Latino migration, racial politics, and community change in Nashville, Tennessee, in which she has worked with advocacy groups operating at different scales. She also examines the factors driving changing social and political responses to immigrants in smaller southern towns.    Conflict and advocacy around immigration are key parts of the research.