Shana Scogin

Areas of Interest: Environmental Policy, Governance, Quantitative and Qualitative Methods

I am a PhD Candidate in Comparative Politics in Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science, and I work primarily in local governance and environmental politics. I am interested in the collective action problems presented by acute environmental pressures, and how local politics shape a community’s solutions. My research employs qualitative and quantitative methods, and my methodological interests include model robustness, mixed methods research designs, and developing statistical software.

My dissertation looks to the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal after the 2015 Gorkha earthquake to investigate how community governance structures affect local reconstruction processes, and how residents view the governance of disasters as a responsibility of non-governmental actors, local governing bodies, and national bodies of government. Data for the project come from 100 interviews from in and outside of the Valley, archival work from the Nepal Architecture Archive (NAA) in Kathmandu, and an urban household level survey (n = 1800). In addition, I have ongoing solo-authored and collaborative projects investigating ward-level gender quotas, ‘active’ citizenship and electricity, social dimensions of earthquake early warning systems, gender and reconstruction, and hydropower governance in Nepal. My solo-authored and collaborative work has been published in Global Environmental Politics and Disasters, and I have led the creation of two R packages that are currently available on CRAN.

Eighteen months of data collection and language training for my project and broader research agenda has been funded by the Kellogg Institute, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies, the Liu Institute, the Notre Dame Program for Interdisciplinary Educational Research, and the Fulbright Program.

My BA is in Political Science with a minor in Molecular Biology from Kenyon College, and I have an MA in Political Science from Marquette University.