Doug McAdam

Doug McAdam is Professor of Sociology and Director of Urban Studies at Stanford University. He is director emeritus of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2001-05). He is the Leading figure in the development of the dominant approach to the study of social movements, the political process model. He has applied this model in several prize-winning studies of the civil rights movement. He is currently working on three major research projects. The first is a comprehensive follow-up study of all accepted applicants to the Teach for America (TFA) Program between 1993-1998. The study is primarily interested in assessing the longer-term "civic effects" of the TFA experience. The second project seeks to understand the factors that shape county-level variation in arson attacks on churches in the U.S. between 1996-2001. The specific question of interest is whether a history of racial conflict in the county is related to the burning of African-American churches. Finally, McAdam is collaborating with Rob Sampson (Harvard) in an ongoing study of neighborhood activism in Chicago between 1970 and 2005. The goal is to better understand the structural factors and dynamic processes that shape the capacity of neighborhood groups to organize and act on their own behalf. In 2012 McAdam received the Gunnar Myrdal Prize in Stockholm, Sweden.