The APSA Distinguished Award for Civic and Community Engagement is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor significant civic or community engagement activity by a political scientist which merges knowledge and practice and has an impact outside of the profession or the academy.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Dr. Beausoleil created a powerful, research-informed, initiative to counter online, racialized hate against Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. She partnered with Te Raukura O’Connell Rapira, a Māori community organizer, to create a nationwide, anti-racism training program that equips non-Māori with tools to productively engage with racist thinking. Based on years of field research with cross-sectoral practitioners on how to foster listening in the face of challenge, the project’s novel approach moves beyond “calling out” and fact-checking errant claims to using listening- and value-based strategies.
Participants undergo a formal eight-week training session to learn these engagement techniques. Independent assessments show that this approach leads to several positive outcomes: changes in tone and position from racist commentators; appreciation from those targeted by racism; changes in opinions; and improvement in the overall online discourse.
The training has sparked significant civic and community engagement in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond. It has been adapted for use by other organizations and individuals including History teachers in New Zealand, as they tackle difficult subjects; Māori youth, as they create resources to support conversations on racism and belonging; and the New Zealand Ministries of Health, Justice, and Social Development. The training has also garnered interest and uptake by community and activist organisations and academics in Canada, Ireland, Australia, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. It has also been adapted by Greenpeace to promote climate conversations and by Every Gender to counter anti-trans discrimination.
The committee enthusiastically agrees that this project and Dr. Emily Beausoleil embody the spirit and the letter of the APSA Distinguished Award for Civic and Community Engagement.
Emily Beausoleil is a Senior Lecturer of Politics at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa, New Zealand, where she explores the conditions, challenges, and creative possibilities for voice and listening in conditions of deep difference and structural inequality. As a grounded normative theorist, she studies embodied expertise across diverse sectors and collaborates with communities to innovate designs for public dialogue that effectively encourage listening where it is most difficult and needed. Foremost among these civic initiatives is a nationwide anti-racism program and community of practice that since 2018 has trained and supported over 500 non-Māori to address anti-Māori racism on and offline using a novel research-led approach. Each formal training generates approx. 9,000 online interventions, with impacts systematically demonstrated through an independent research study and that professional online moderators find difficult to achieve.
Beausoleil is also co-Editor-in-Chief for Democratic Theory Journal, Associate Investigator for the current Australian Research Council grant ‘Democratic Resilience: The Public Sphere and Extremist Attacks,’ and Research Associate of He Whenua Taurikura – Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism Centre for Research Excellence. Her research on listening in the context of structural injustice won the 2021 Royal Society Te Āparangi’s Early Career Research Excellence Award for Social Sciences, and alongside over 30 articles, her first book, Staging Democracy: The Political Work of Live Performance, inaugurated a book series with De Gruyter in 2023.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Karen M. Kedrowski (Chair) of Iowa State University, Dr. Stephen Danley of Rutgers University – Camden, Dr. Samantha A. Majic of CUNY-John Jay College, Dr. Kathy Postel Kretman of Georgetown University, and Dr. Austin Trantham of Saint Leo University.