J. Jarpa Dawuni, Ph.D. ’10 in political science from Georgia State and now an associate professor at Howard University was featured in the NY Times discussing why it makes a difference when the first member of a group rises to a position of power. Dawuni explained that despite the importance of recognizing and celebrating such achievements, it is even more important to “recognize that these achievements are always achievements that can be taken away if we don’t work to sustain it.”
In some cases, such as the one of Kamala Harris, several overlapping communities are being represented, which is bound to disappoint some of those communities; this was the case with President Obama.
Dawuni earned her Ph.D. at Georgia State in 2010 under the supervision of Dr. Carrie Manning on the impact of formal democracy on the construction of an effective civil society in Ghana. Since then, she has won several awards.
In 2016 she received the President Obama White House Presidential Award for her service on the Board of the African Research Academies for Women (ARA-W); in the same year, she was awarded the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship to undertake a project on graduate student mentoring and research at the Faculty of Law, University of Ghana. In 2018 Dawuni was a Fulbright Specialist Scholar to Ghana, where she designed a Center for Research in African Union Law. She is the founder and Executive Director of the non-profit Institute for African Women in Law (IAWL), a Global Scholar at the Wilson Center Women in Public Service Project, and sits on the board of the West Africa Research Association (WARA) and the ARA-W.
Read her full comments in the NY Times.