May 10, 2021
Dr. Bracic's book "Breaking the Exclusion Cycle: How to Promote Cooperation between Majority and Minority Ethnic Groups" was named Honorable Mention for the prize by the Association for the Study of Nationalities World Convention.
The full list of ASN 2021 Awards is available at https://www.asnconvention.com/asn-2021-awards.
Dr. Bracic is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at Michigan State University and a member of the Minority Politics Initiative at MSU. From 2014 to 2019, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma. Her research is predominantly in the field of comparative politics, and focuses on questions of human rights, discrimination, the persistence of social exclusion, and ground-level effectiveness of human rights institutions, such as NGOs. Most of her research relies on lab-in-field and survey experiments. In order to gather data from severely underrepresented populations, such as Roma in Central Europe, Dr. Bracic uses innovative approaches to measurement, like videogames. Dr. Bracic is a co-founder of Community Engagement + Experiments Lab at the University of Oklahoma and served on its faculty advisory board. Dr. Bracic earned her PhD from the Politics Department at NYU in 2013.
In "Breaking the Exclusion Cycle: How to Promote Cooperation between Majority and Minority Ethnic Groups", Dr. Bracic developed a theory of how individual behaviors contribute to the persistence of social exclusion. She illustrates that theory by examining the behaviors of Roma and non-Roma, which I captures through an original video game. Dr. Bracic then explores how Roma-led NGO action can help break the vicious cycle of social exclusion.