Decades later, that curiosity — about what drives citizens to act collectively and strengthens democracy — has earned the Johns Hopkins political scientist one of the nation’s highest honors: the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant.
Awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the grant is a no-strings-attached fellowship that awards Han and her fellow grantees over $800,000 over five years to support their work however they choose.
“Totally, completely flabbergasted,” Han posted on social media following the announcement.
The process by which grantees are chosen is shrouded in mystery. Without any applicants, prospective grantees are nominated by guests invited from across a broad range of fields and interests. The nominees are evaluated and chosen by an anonymous selection committee made up of leaders from diverse professions.
This year’s 22 MacArthur fellows work in areas ranging from photography and fiction writing to astronomy and interdisciplinary artmaking. Han is the first political scientist to be awarded the grant since 2001.
Han wasn’t always interested in politics.
Growing up in Houston as a daughter of Korean immigrants, it was seeing how her family transformed as part of a new community that stuck with her.
Politics weren’t a part of her formal education as an undergraduate student at Harvard. She studied history and literature. Han describes her foray into political organizing as happen-chance. The social service organization she’d joined entered into a prolonged argument with the university.
“We didn’t actually win the deliberation,” Han said. But the “experience of collective action was so intoxicating” that it jump-started her love of politics.
Han went on to work in “capital P politics,” doing campaign and policy work in D.C. before earning here Ph.D. at Stanford University.
There, she explored how people from low-resource communities and the margins of public life are pulled from the sidelines into political action.
Han’s doctoral work became her first book in 2009, “Moved to Action: Motivation, Participation, and Inequality in American Politics.” Through interviews with activists from marginalized communities, she found that deep personal commitments, such as a child’s education or a friend’s well-being, are what drive people to act.
“She was doing such innovative, creative research, more than anyone I had met,” said Adam Seth Levine, a professor of health policy and management at JHU.
Her unique work about the relationship between science and society stood out to Levine because of how it sought “to equip people to work together to solve problems in communities that they care about.”
In 2021, Han became the inaugural director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute, an academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy.
Several projects on effective organizational strategies and citizen mobilization marked Han’s tenure at the Agora.
One became her most recent book — “Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church.”
The book is an example of her constant scientific interest: “how we can learn from outliers relative to the trends we see around us,” Han said.
For months Han embedded herself in one of the largest Evangelical megachurches in the country in Cincinnati to explore the community’s organizing for racial justice.
It struck her how “people really lived out their principle that belonging comes before belief. That no matter what you believe, we welcome you into our community.”
This powerful idea, Han observed, allowed people to be more open to deep conversations and having greater willingness to change their minds.
While Han is unsure what big question she will embark on next, she is working with a mathematician specializing in the study of networks to potentially simulate political dynamics using large language models.
The project, Han said, aims to “understand what mechanisms allow a better kind of politics to become self-replicating.” She believes identifying these mechanisms would improve people’s current experience of politics.
Han remains interested in finding and studying people outside of the norm who are practicing politics by “negotiating viewpoints” instead of just expressing them.
The promise of democracy, she said, has been to overcome an inequality of resources with an equality of voice.
Source: The Baltimore Banner
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