BLOG Faculty Contributors Biographies
John Burdick is a Professor of Anthropology and has conducted research on social movements, activism, and cultural politics for over twenty-five years. His main areas of investigation are the role of religion in motivating and impeding political activism; the politics of liberation theology and evangelical Protestantism in Latin America; the mobilization and demobilization of Afro-Brazilians around racial politics; and the role of expressive culture, including music, in generating collective action frames. He is currently completing a book entitled The Color of Sound, which analyzes the role of popular music in the development of oppositional politics among evangelicals in São Paulo. More recently, he has developed projects on community organizing in the United States and the rights-based strategy among transnational non-governmental organizations.
Bruce Winfield Dayton is Adjunct Assistant Professor, Political Science and Associate Director, Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. 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.
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. Her research projects: The city of Jerusalem from an Interdisciplinary perspective; the relationship between history and political science; religious political parties in democracies; prospects for democratization in the Middle East; Israel’s domestic and foreign policy.
Paul D. Hirsch is the research director for PARCC's focus in environmental conflicts and collaboration. He is a research assistant professor in department of public administration, with an appointment to the Center for Environmental Policy and Administration. Paul's academic background is in conservation ecology, public policy, and environmental philosophy and politics. His practical area of expertise is in facilitating cross-boundary dialog and problem-solving.
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 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.
Christina Merchant is a Professor of Practice in Public Administration and a Faculty Associate with the Program on the Advancement of Research in Conflict and Collaboration. Her area of expertise is conflict resolution theory and skills, labor relations in the public sector.
Ines Mergel is an Assistant Professor in Public Administration. Her research focuses on (online and offline) informal social networks among public managers. 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.
Tina Nabatchi is an Assistant Professor in Public Administration. Her 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 is a Distinguished Professor of Public Administration and the Howard and Louise Phanstiel Chair in Strategic Management and Leadership. 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.
Robert 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.