Church, State and Sex: How Africa's transnational churches shape human rights (book project)
My first book project locates East African mainline church leaders and domestic church-state relations at the center of efforts to diffuse transnational human rights norms. It tracks national church involvement in three agendas: combating gender-based violence, advancing female leadership, and accepting sexual minorities. Each issue inspired various levels of initiative, adoption, or resistance among Africa's national churches, which I argue can only be thoroughly explained when church leaders are understood as political shareholders embedded within multiple, often conflicting, sets of foreign and domestic political relationships. This analysis elucidates the global inequalities, continued dependencies, and latent racialized sentiments that percolate within global religious networks, and it demonstrates that transnational politics variously advance and threaten to undermine rights-based movements for East Africa's marginalized groups. The book closes by contextualizing these dynamics within broader comparative systems of politics and capitalism that shape different opportunity structures for women and sexual minorities. It demonstrates opportunities and offers cautions to U.S. policymakers and activists seeking to advance human rights in the global South.
When States Target Their Own: British Justifications for Internment without Trial (postdoctoral fellowship project)
How do liberal democracies justify policies that violate the rights of targeted citizens? When facing real or perceived national security threats, democratic states routinely frame certain citizens as “enemies of the state” and subsequently undermine those citizens’ freedom and liberties. This project uses archive ethnography, qualitative process-tracing, and natural language processing (NLP) techniques on digitized archive documents to identify and model how United Kingdom government officials internally justified their decisions to intern un-convicted Irish Catholics without trial during its “Troubles with Northern Ireland.” This project seeks to advance knowledge about government human rights violations; explores the use of qualitative and NLP approaches on rich, nuanced, and “messy” archive text; and models the promise of combining archive text, qualitative coding, and computational techniques in social science. This project is funded by NSF Award #1823547; Principal Investigators: Emily Gade, Noah Smith, and Michael McCann.
Peer-reviewed
Under review
Works in Progress
Book chapters
SELECT RESEARCH GRANTS AND PROGRAMS
My first book project locates East African mainline church leaders and domestic church-state relations at the center of efforts to diffuse transnational human rights norms. It tracks national church involvement in three agendas: combating gender-based violence, advancing female leadership, and accepting sexual minorities. Each issue inspired various levels of initiative, adoption, or resistance among Africa's national churches, which I argue can only be thoroughly explained when church leaders are understood as political shareholders embedded within multiple, often conflicting, sets of foreign and domestic political relationships. This analysis elucidates the global inequalities, continued dependencies, and latent racialized sentiments that percolate within global religious networks, and it demonstrates that transnational politics variously advance and threaten to undermine rights-based movements for East Africa's marginalized groups. The book closes by contextualizing these dynamics within broader comparative systems of politics and capitalism that shape different opportunity structures for women and sexual minorities. It demonstrates opportunities and offers cautions to U.S. policymakers and activists seeking to advance human rights in the global South.
When States Target Their Own: British Justifications for Internment without Trial (postdoctoral fellowship project)
How do liberal democracies justify policies that violate the rights of targeted citizens? When facing real or perceived national security threats, democratic states routinely frame certain citizens as “enemies of the state” and subsequently undermine those citizens’ freedom and liberties. This project uses archive ethnography, qualitative process-tracing, and natural language processing (NLP) techniques on digitized archive documents to identify and model how United Kingdom government officials internally justified their decisions to intern un-convicted Irish Catholics without trial during its “Troubles with Northern Ireland.” This project seeks to advance knowledge about government human rights violations; explores the use of qualitative and NLP approaches on rich, nuanced, and “messy” archive text; and models the promise of combining archive text, qualitative coding, and computational techniques in social science. This project is funded by NSF Award #1823547; Principal Investigators: Emily Gade, Noah Smith, and Michael McCann.
Peer-reviewed
- Sarah K. Dreier, James Long, and Stephen Winkler. "African, Religious, and Tolerant? How Religious Diversity Shapes Attitudes Towards Sexual Minorities in Africa." Politics & Religion. [replication]
- Sarah K. Dreier and Milli Lake. 2019. "Institutional Legitimacy in Sub-Saharan Africa." Democratization [replication].
- Sarah K. Dreier. 2018. "Resisting Rights to Renounce Imperialism: East African Churches' Strategic Symbolic Resistance to LGBTQ Inclusion." International Studies Quarterly 62(2):423-436.
- Kassra A.R. Oskooii, Sarah K. Dreier, and Loren Collingwood. 2018. "Partisan Attitudes Toward Sanctuary Cities: Asymmetrical Effects of Political Knowledge." Politics and Policy 46(6):951-984.
- Loren Collingwood, Benjamin Gonzalez-O'Brien, and Sarah Dreier. 2018. "Evaluating Ballot Initiative Support for Legalized Marijuana: The Case of Washington." International Journal of Drug Policy 56:6-20.
Under review
- Emily K. Gade, Sarah K. Dreier, John Wilkerson, and Ann Washington. "Congressional Religiosity: A Web Archive Approach to Measuring Legislator Attributes." (conditionally accepted, British Journal of Political Science).
- Sarah K. Dreier, Emily K. Gade, and John Wilkerson. "Dangers, Toils, and Snares: U.S. Senators' Rhetoric of Public Anxiety and Religiosity." (revise and resubmit, Politics and Religion).
- Emily K. Gade, Dallas Card, Sarah K. Dreier, and Noah Smith. "What Counts as Terrorism? Racial heuristics and Media Portrayals of Mass Shooters." (under review).
- Milli Lake, Sarah K. Dreier, and Arthur Alik Lagrange. “Social Protection and the Social Contract.” (accepted for publication, Annual Review of Political Science Vol 24).
Works in Progress
- Church, State and Sex: How Africa's transnational churches delimit human rights. (book project)
- "The Partisan Dimensions of Religious Rhetoric: Merging qualitative and Natural Language Processing approaches to measuring Congressional behavior," with Lucy H. Lin, Sofia Serrano, Emily Gade, and Noah A. Smith. [presentation]
- "When States Target Their Own: British Justifications for Catholic Internment in Northern Ireland," with Emily Gade, Michael McCann, and Noah Smith.
- "Analyzing Government Archives: Using Natural Language Processing to amplify process-tracing analyzes," with Emily Gade.
- "Anti-state Violence, Pro-Government Militia and State Repression in Northern Ireland: An Event Dataset," with Emily Gade and Dani Villa.
Book chapters
- Sarah K. Dreier. 2010. "It's Not About Free Expression: An Examination of the Danish Cartoon Controversy." In Reza Banakar, ed. Rights In Context: Law and Justice in Late Modern Society. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company.
SELECT RESEARCH GRANTS AND PROGRAMS
- eScience Data Science Incubator, "British Justifications for Internment: An NLP Approach."
- NSF Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Research Grant (postdoctoral recipient; PIs: Emily Gade, Michael McCann, Noah Smith)
- UW Center for Human Rights Mack and Mayerfeld Research Grant
- UW Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies Research Grant
- Assoc. for the Sociology of Religion Joseph Fichter Research Grant
- Women of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Scholarship
- UW Chester Fritz Fellowship for International Research
- UW Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (for Swahili)
- UW Jackson School African Studies Ottenberg-Winans Fellowship
