Faculty Fellow Jaimie Bleck has won the 2011 Lynne Rienner Award for Best Dissertation in African Politics from the American Political Science Association’s Africa Politics Conference Group (APCG). Sponsored by the publisher Lynne Rienner, the award carries a $500 prize.
Bleck’s award-winning work, “Schooling Citizens: Education, Citizenship, and Democracy in Mali,” explores the political effect of education in the West African country.
According to the selection committee, the dissertation is “informed by a deep knowledge of contemporary Mali, methodologically sound, and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the links between education, state service provision, and democracy.”
Bleck is currently expanding the work into a book manuscript.
“I am analyzing how different educational experiences—public/private and secular/Islamic—affect citizenship in Mali in the context of expanded access to schooling,” she explains.
She draws on data from a year of fieldwork, including 1000 surveys, exit polls during municipal elections, politicians' educational profiles, government schooling data, and interviews with Malian educators and government officials as well as 200 university students.
Bleck joined the Notre Dame faculty in fall 2011 as the Ford Family Assistant Professor of Political Science. She received her PhD from Cornell University, where her dissertation committee included Nicolas van de Walle (chair), Valerie Bunce, Kenneth Roberts, and Devra Coren Moehler.
Contact: Jaimie Bleck (574) 631-5069 or Jaimie.Bleck.1@nd.edu