Summary
Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University.
Research Interests: Civic and political participation, collective action, organizing, and social change, focusing particularly on the role of civic associations
Education: PhD, Stanford University
World Economic Forum – 31/08/2022 (07:51)
Social movements are behind the most powerful changes in the world – from voting rights to political upheavals to the fight for racial equality. But how do you build a movement that unites millions of people and captures the attention of those in power?
This episode of the World Economic Forum’s #ExpertsExplain series delves into the art of creating successful social movements with #HahrieHan, Professor of Political Science at #JohnsHopkinsUniversity.
Han is also Inaugural Director of #SNFAgora Institute, using data and research to realise the promise of democracy all over the world, and an award-winning member of the Schwab Foundation for Social Enterpreneurship.
We live in an era when social media makes it easier than ever to find followers and get noticed. ‘I can send out one tweet or a viral hashtag. I can get hundreds of thousands or even millions of people out into the streets,’ says Han, who has written four books about #SocialChange. ‘
But when you talk to the people who are on the frontlines, on the one hand they feel like it’s easier than ever before to get people involved – but on the other hand, it’s harder than ever to make it feel like their participation actually matters.’
So what exactly is the secret to a successful #protest or wider action for #socialgood?
According to Han, there’s more than one. A good movement needs to ‘make the participation of ordinary people possible, so that people can participate,’ she begins. After that, a good movement ‘makes it probable, so that people want to participate. And then it makes it powerful. It creates a scaffolding or a vehicle through which people can realise their own power.
‘And one of the trends that we’re seeing in social movements in the 21st century is this funny paradox between participation being possible but not being as powerful.’
Read the full interview here: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/0…
OnAir Post: Hahrie Han
News
Harvard Gazette, – April 19, 2024
Donating money, signing petitions, and sharing views on social media are some of the common ways Americans exercise their civic duty. Hahrie Han ’97 says they aren’t enough.
The professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, who delivered the first of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Paine Hall last week, said revitalizing American democracy will require an additional ingredient. She argued that today’s citizens are not given enough opportunity for collective activities that cultivate feelings of belonging and agency.
“Part of what we’ve lost in 21st-century America is a particular form of collective action that teaches people the commitments and capabilities of power-sharing that are necessary in pluralistic democracy,” said Han, who directs Johns Hopkins’ SNF Agora Institute and P3 Research Lab.
Local faith institutions and social organizations are the top providers of civic engagement, and civic opportunity decreases as poverty levels increase, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute.
People in many parts of the United States possess few chances for the robust community engagement that underpins healthy democracies, according to a new report that for the first time maps civic opportunity across the country.
The heat map created by Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute, reveals patterns of inequality in civic opportunity tied to race, class, immigration status and education. Researchers also found that a great deal of civic engagement happens through local faith institutions and social and fraternal organizations, not D.C.-based advocacy organizations that tend to carry political clout.
The report is the initial phase of an ambitious effort to map the modern agora, referring to the lively assembly places of ancient Greece often considered to be the birthplace of democracy. The work is published in Nature Human Behaviour.
Han’s research, which entails connecting with people organizing social movements on the ground around the world, deals with what these movements can teach us about how to harness civic engagement to strengthen democracy. Learn more about the award.
Created in 2018 through a $150 million grant from SNF, the SNF Agora Institute brings together experts from political science, psychology, philosophy, and other disciplines to translate scholarly insights into actionable knowledge that can make pluralistic democracy more resilient. Upcoming events include a discussion with U.S. Congressman Jamie Raskin on Making Your Voice Count: Activism, Voting, and the Democratic Ideal.
About
Short Bio
Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She is an award-winning author of four books and numerous articles published in leading scholarly outlets including the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, Nature Human Behavior, PNAS, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and elsewhere.
She has also written for outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a 2022 Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation. Her fifth book, about faith and race in America with a focus on evangelical megachurches, will be published with Knopf in September 2024.
Source: Personal website
Long Bio
Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a 2022 Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation. From 2015-2019, she was the Anton Vonk Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara. From 2005-2015, she was on faculty of the Department of Political Science at Wellesley College and a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Harvard University from 2009-2011. She specializes in the study of organizing, movements, collective action, civic engagement, and democracy.
She has published four books. Her most recent book (co-authored with Liz McKenna and Michelle Oyakawa) was published by the University of Chicago Press in July 2021, entitled Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America. This book examines the way some grassroots organizations translate the engagement of their people into political power, acting like prisms refracting white light into vectors of power and light and was awarded the Michael Harrington Book Award by the American Political Science Association in 2022. Her fifth book, about faith and race in America with a focus on evangelical megachurches, will be published with Knopf in September 2024.
Her previous book, How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2014) examines the strategies that the most effective civic associations use to engage activists and develop leaders in health and environmental politics. Another book, Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America (co-authored with Liz McKenna, Oxford University Press, 2014) describes the strategies the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaign used to engage so many grassroots activists in communities across America. Her first book, Moved to Action: Motivation, Participation, and Inequality in American Politics (Stanford University Press, 2009) examined the ways in which people become motivated to participate in politics, looking particularly at means of engaging underprivileged populations in political action. Hahrie’s other work on participation, movement-building, civic associations, primary elections, and congressional polarization has been published in outlets including American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, Nature Human Behavior, PNAS, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and elsewhere. Her work was a finalist for the 2022 frank Prize for Excellence in Public Interest Communication and was awarded the 2013 Outstanding Academic Publication on Membership Organizations Award by the Institute for Nonprofit Research, Education, and Engagement.
Hahrie has also been involved in numerous efforts to make academic work relevant to the world of practice, including (most recently): serving as the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute; co-founding the Center for Democracy and Organizing; participating in the Social Science Research Council Anxieties of Democracy Participation Working Group; and co-founding and co-directing the Project on Public Leadership and Action at Wellesley College. She currently serves on the board of the JPB Foundation, the Water Foundation, and serves on advisory boards for Citizens Climate Lobby, the Walton Family Foundation Home Region Research Advisory Council, and others. She has also served on the editorial boards of American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, and the Milbank Quarterly. Through her research, she has partnered with a wide range of civic and political organizations and movements around the world, including those in the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. In all of this work, she seeks to develop the leadership of younger scholars and practitioners, especially women and people of color.
She also acted as co-convenor of a Policy Advisory Committee for the 2008 Obama campaign and served as Chair of the Advisory Committee to the EAC Agency Review Team on the Obama-Biden Transition Team and also as National Issues and Policy Advisor to Senator Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign in 1999-2000. She received her Ph.D. in American Politics from Stanford University in 2005 and her B.A. in American History and Literature from Harvard University in 1997. She was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow from 2002-2005 and received Stanford University’s Centennial Teaching Award in 2002 and Wellesley College’s Apgar Award for Innovative Teaching in 2006. She is the daughter of Korean immigrants, grew up in Houston, Texas, and currently lives in Baltimore, MD.
Here is Hahrie’s full CV (updated January 2020).
Source: Personal website
Contact
Email: School
Locations
Krieger School of Arts & Sciences The Department of Political Science
329 Wyman Park
Baltimore, MD
Phone: 410-516-0592;
Web Links
Videos
The Science of Building Successful Movements
October 6, 2021 (01:00:05)
By: Johns Hopkins University
What’s the difference between a movement that wins victories for its constituents, and one that fails? What are the factors that make collective action powerful?
Join professor of political science and SNF Agora Institute director Hahrie Han for a discussion of her new book, Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America. Co-authored with Elizabeth McKenna and Michelle Oyakawa, the book uses data from six recent U.S. examples to show that the power of successful movements most often is rooted in their ability to act as “prisms of the people,” turning participation into political power just as prisms transform white light into rainbows.
Joined by SNF Agora deputy director Stephen Ruckman, Han will talk about what she and her co-authors learned about the choices organizations made and strategies they used to win power—and what you can do to make change happen.
P3 Lab
About
Source: SNF Agora website
The P3 lab examines the way civic and political organizations make the participation of ordinary people Possible, Probable, and Powerful.
SNF Agora Institute Director Hahrie Han is faculty director of the P3 lab, which seeks to understand how to make the participation of ordinary people Possible, Probable, and Powerful in a way that helps realize democracy in the United States and around the world, and equips us to create sustainable, just, and equitable futures.
Possible– All people must have the ability to actively participate. This means we work to identify and remove societal barriers that prohibit participation and implementation of policies.
Probable- People must want, and should be encouraged, to take part in the political process.
Powerful- Too often, we hear people say that their participation in the process doesn’t make a difference. To combat this, our research explores how to make participation more impactful — having a tangible effect on policy decisions and improving the lives of their community.
Mission & Vision
Source: P3 Website
Our Mission
We are a multi-disciplinary research lab based at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University committed to learning and shared inquiry that meets the twin goals of relevance and rigor while helping to realize our vision. Our work simultaneously pushes the frontiers of strategic thinking in organizing and knowledge-building in academic scholarship.
We ground our research in an analysis of people’s fight for power and voice in public life, an understanding of the struggle for power as dependent on dynamic strategy, and a recognition that people’s greatest source of power is their ability to act as a collective.
Our research is animated by three key questions:
- How do we identify and remove barriers to making participation possible?
- What strategies can movements and organizations use to pull people of all kinds off the sidelines of public life and make their actions more probable?
- How can movements and organizations translate the engagement of their base into the power they need to realize the world they want?
Our Approach
Our work differentiates itself not just in what we study, but how we study it. We are focused particularly on research that helps identify and sharpen the strategic choices political actors make. We believe in co-creating knowledge between academics and practitioners, and all of our research seeks to meet the highest standards of academic rigor while also generating usable knowledge for movement leaders and communities.
Our lab also invests in broadly sharing what we learn to support organizations and movements in building power, to advance the frontiers of academic research, and to support funders in understanding the landscape of collective action and power building.
Finally, we make deep investments in the next generation of scholars, with a focus on Black, Indigenous, and people of color, working class, and queer scholars, to increase capacity for research that sits at the intersection of movements and academia.
Our Team
Our team comes from a range of backgrounds — with researchers coming from sociology, public health, political science, and data science as well as community organizing and political advocacy. People join us at different phases of their academic journey, from undergraduates and graduate students, to postdocs and faculty. Please visit our Partner with Us page to understand more about joining our team.
Directors:
 | Hahrie Han, Faculty Director Inaugural Director, SNF Agora Institute Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University |
 | Jane Booth-Tobin, Lab Director |
Researchers/Project Teams:
 | Lynsy Smithson-Stanley Graduate Student |
 | Jae Yeon Kim Research Fellow |
 | Milan DeVries Mapping the Modern Agora Project Director |
 | Naomi Joseph Predoctoral Fellow |
 | Kristine Lu Postdoctoral fellow |
 | Arianna Genis Organizer-in-Residence |
 | Alexandra Dildine Graduate student |
 | Matthew Denney Postdoctoral Fellow |
Our Work
Designing Resilient Coalitions
Elizabeth Zack
Strategic Capacity
Jane Booth-Tobin
Mapping the Modern Agora
Milan de Vries
Partner with Us
Our Approach
As we develop any research partnership, one of our biggest concerns is identifying questions and projects that advance learning both for us as researchers as well as the organizers working on the ground. We begin by asking, what are the questions that keep you up at night? What are the strategic questions at the forefront of your mind? From there, we work to build a framework of learning around the strategic questions they are asking themselves.
The P3 Lab employs a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. We use mixed-method observational research as well as field experiments to test causal identification. We also have a large-scale computational project going on that draws on NLP and network tools.
The type of methods we use or the scale of the project can range significantly. We often find that it works best to partner on a small scale project to build a relationship and for the P3 Lab to better understand your research before embarking on a long-term partnership.
To better understand what this iterative process has looked like in the past, take a look at this video from P3 Postdoc Elizabeth McKenna:
Students, Postdocs, & Hiring
Source: P3 Website
We’re always looking to bring students, fellows, postdocs, and other researchers onto our team to support our projects and invest in scholars at different points in their journeys and welcome communications from people who are interested. Please see below to understand more about our team before reaching out.
Undergraduate & Graduate Students
For current undergraduate students and graduate students at Johns Hopkins, as well as potential doctoral students interested in studying with Hahrie, there are a number of ways to get involved with the P3 lab. Start by reading this document and then get in touch — tell us about yourself, what you currently study and your interest in P3. Someone will get back to you to set-up a follow-up conversation.
Postdocs
P3 generally has one to two postdocs working with the Lab. During their time with us, postdocs spend about half of their time on their own research and half collaborating with other Lab members on existing P3 research projects.
Our postdoc positions for the 2023-2024 academic year are full. We will update this page as soon as opportunities become available, but you can read more about the position and requirements here.
Fellowship & Job Postings
We frequently host a Predoctoral Fellow interested in learning more about engaged research in social movements and community organizing, particularly within race-class subjugated communities. We are not currently accepting applications, but you can see more about the position, expectations, and application details here.
We will share additional fellowship and job postings here for project directors and other non-student roles here as they arise.
Learning Opportunities
Source: P3 Website
The team at P3 is always excited about sharing our research with other scholars and partnering with funders and practitioners to look at how our research can support your work. Existing opportunities include:
Organizer Seminar
This fall, the P3 Lab is excited to launch our second seminar for senior organizers. This is a space for organizers with a decade or more of experience in community organizing and movement leadership to take a step back from their daily work and wrestle with larger questions about organizing and power with a small group of peers from across the country.
Through a mix of in-person convenings and online conversations, we’ll deepen our collective understanding of the kind of power we are trying to build and our best strategies to build it, look at how the right has built power leading up to this moment, and dive into research on the structures and strategies that support power building in our organizations and coalitions. In each conversation, we’ll read and discuss pieces on what is currently known on these topics before discussing how to apply this research in your own context and identifying what is missing from these frameworks. At our closing convening, we’ll work to consolidate our learnings into a vision for future organizing and research and to support each other in the hard work of applying what you’ve learned in your communities.
Head here to learn more and apply.
Presenting Our Research
If you’d like someone from the lab to speak to your team, please contact us and include a brief description of your work, what you are curious about, and any sort of timeline you are working on.
Learning Spaces
P3 is exploring different formats for deeper exploration of our research and collaborative learning with funders and practitioners. Please be in touch if you are interested in partnering on a training series or fellowship.
Newsletter for Practitioners
Source: P3 Website
Our team is constantly learning in partnership with organizations working to translate people’s collective action into power. Each month, we’ll share some of these learnings in our newsletter. Our hope is to offer tangible findings that you can apply to your own work, agitational concepts and questions to support you in reflection, and to engage in a back-and-forth about how you see our research living out in your daily work.
Books
Undivided
Source: P3 website
The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church
The story of evangelical leaders in Cincinnati struggling to bridge racial divides in their own church, their community, and across the nation
In one of the largest evangelical megachurches in America, thousands of congregants have participated in a remarkable experiment: Undivided, a six-week program developed by church leaders, designed to cultivate meaningful relationships across race, and to foster antiracism grounded in action. The designers of Undivided recognized that any effort to combat racial injustice had to move beyond addressing only individual prejudice. Change, therefore, would have to be radical—from the very roots—tracing both individual prejudices and the structures that perpetuate them. Hahrie Han, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, was given complete and open access to tell the story of their work. In Undivided, she details the program’s development, its participants’ efforts to navigate the complexities of race and faith during the Trump era, and its effects. Han also addresses the history of the white evangelical movement, including the ongoing contestation over its historic ties to white supremacy and exclusion.
Han’s narrative weaves together the accounts of four congregants—two men, one Black and one white; two women, one Black and one white—who participated in Undivided and dedicated themselves to carrying forward the work of constructing racial solidarity. Their journeys were courageous, eye-opening, at times painful, always complex and uncertain—and unfinished.
None of them came away unchanged.
Prisms of People
Power and Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America
Published in 2021 from the University of Chicago Press, this book (co-authored by Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa) examines outlying case studies of constituency-based organizations in America that were able to turn the engagement of their constituency base into political influence. The book examines commonalities in the organizational infrastructure these organizations built, arguing that these organizations acted like prisms, taking in white light and refracting it into power. The book unpacks the design choices at the heart of the prisms that made this transformative work possible, and develops a new set of measures to examine the kind of power these organizations built. The book won the 2022 Michael Harrington Book Award from the American Political Science Association.
Read blogposts and other writing about the book at The Monkey Cage of the Washington Post, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Mobilizing Ideas, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) blog, The Forge, and Markets, Power, and Culture.
Read reviews in Social Forces, Mobilization, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Micah Sifry’s The Connector, Tetonica, 3Streams, and check out our book on SSIR’s 2021 Reading List for Social Change Leaders and Act Build Change’s 2021 Best Books List.
Listen to podcasts on The Majority Report with Sam Seder, The Open Mind, Reasons to be Cheerful with Ed Milliband, Public Health On Call, Elevate Maryland, Everywhere Radio of Rural Assembly, and so on.
Join us on tour at one of our upcoming events.
How organizations develop activists
Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century
Why are some civic associations better than others at getting–and keeping–people involved in activism? From MoveOn.org to the National Rifle Association, Health Care for America Now to the Sierra Club, membership-based civic associations constantly seek to engage people in civic and political action. What makes some more effective than others?
Using in-person observations, surveys, and field experiments, this book compares organizations with strong records of engaging people in health and environmental politics to those with weaker records. To build power, civic associations need quality and quantity (or depth and breadth) of activism. They need lots of people to take action and also a cadre of leaders to develop and execute that activity. Yet, models for how to develop activists and leaders are not necessarily transparent. This book provides these models to help associations build the power they want and support a healthy democracy. In particular, the book examines organizing, mobilizing, and lone wolf models of engagement and shows how highly active associations blend mobilizing and organizing to transform their members’ motivations and capacities for involvement.
This is not a simple story about the power of offline versus online organizing. Instead, it is a story about how associations can blend both online and offline strategies to build their activist base. In this compelling book, Hahrie Han explains how civic associations can invest in their members and build the capacity they need to inspire action.
Read reviews of the book at The Journal of Politics, American Journal of Sociology, Mobilizing Ideas, Social Forces, Mobilization, and Political Science Quarterly.
Purchase HODA from Amazon or Oxford University Press.
Groundbreakers
How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America
by Elizabeth McKenna & Hahrie Han
Much has been written about the historic nature of the Obama campaign. The multi-year, multi-billion dollar operation elected the nation’s first black president, raised and spent more money than any other election effort in history, and built the most sophisticated voter targeting technology ever before used on a national campaign. What is missing from most accounts of the campaign is an understanding of how Obama for America recruited, motivated, developed, and managed its formidable army of 2.2 million volunteers. Unlike previous field campaigns that drew their power from staff, consultants, and paid canvassers, the Obama campaign’s capacity came from unpaid local citizens who took responsibility for organizing their own neighborhoods months–and even years–in advance of election day. In so doing,Groundbreakers argues, the campaign engaged citizens in the work of practicing democracy. How did they organize so many volunteers to produce so much valuable work for the campaign? This book describes how.
Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han argue that the legacy of Obama for America extends beyond big data and micro-targeting; it also reinvigorated and expanded traditional models of field campaigning.Groundbreakers makes the case that the Obama campaign altered traditional ground games by adopting the principles and practices of community organizing. Drawing on in-depth interviews with OFA field staff and volunteers, this book also argues that a key achievement of the OFA’s field organizing was its transformative effect on those who were a part of it. Obama the candidate might have inspired volunteers to join the campaign, but it was the fulfilling relationships that volunteers had with other people–and their deep belief that their work mattered for the work of democracy–that kept them active.
Groundbreakers documents how the Obama campaign has inspired a new way of running field campaigns, with lessons for national and international political and civic movements.
Read a review of the book at Perspectives on Politics and The Boston Review.
Follow the following links to purchase Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America on Amazon or Oxford University Press.
Moved to Action
Motivation, Participation, and Inequality in American Politics
Wealthy, educated, and more privileged people are more likely to participate and be represented in politics than their poorer, less educated, and less privileged counterparts. To reduce these inequalities, we need a better understanding of how the disadvantaged become motivated to participate. Moved to Action fills the current gap in this area of research by examining the commitments and pathways through which the underprivileged become engaged in politics.
Drawing on original, in-depth interviews with political activists and large-scale survey data, author Hahrie C. Han contests the traditional idea that people must be politicized before they participate, and that only idiosyncratic factors outside the control of the political system can drive motivation. Her findings show that that highly personal commitments, such as the quality of children’s education or the desire to help a friend, have a disproportionately large impact in motivating political participation among people with fewer resources. Han makes the case that civic and political organizations can lay the foundation for greater citizen participation by helping people recognize the connections between their personal commitments and politics.
