GOVT Professor Alexandra Blackman Receives APSA Award

Alexandra Blackman, Assistant Professor in the Department of at Cornell University, won the 2021 Aaron Wildavsky Best Dissertation in Religion and Politics Award in the American Political Science Association (APSA) Religion and Politics Section, for her dissertation: “The Politicization of Faith: Settler Colonialism, Education, and Political Identity in Tunisia.” The Aaron Wildavsky Award recognizes the best dissertation in the field of religion and politics. Eligible dissertations have been defended in the last two years, and should make a distinctive contribution to the study of religion and politics, broadly understood.

Blackman's dissertation addresses the puzzle of why some people adopt secular rather than religious political orientations. She argues that distinct educational experiences acquired in the colonial state contribute to these divergent political identities. Examining colonial Tunisia, she finds that indigenous peoples across localities had differential access to French secular and Islamic primary education due to variation in colonial settler density and demands. The differential provision of French and Islamic education led, in turn, to the development of distinct secular and Islamist political identities among native Tunisians.

The dissertation integrates historical and contemporary evidence to demonstrate that regions of Tunisia that were exposed to higher rates of French settlement under colonialism—and thus more secular and fewer religious educational institutions—were more likely to exhibit secular political identities at the time of independence in the mid-twentieth century. This political identities persist and continue to inform political cleavages in Tunisia today. This work has important implications for the study of religion and secularism in the Middle East, as well as highlights the role that mass attitudes play in shaping the ideological commitments of post-independence political parties.

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