Vortherms and Nwakanma receive Dean’s Awards for Outstanding Research
UC Irvine professors Samantha Vortherms and Adaugo Pamela Nwakanma have been named 2026 recipients of the School of Social Sciences Dean’s Awards for Outstanding Research. Funded by the Dean's Leadership Society - a network of supporters and friends committed to the school’s success - each honor carries a $5,000 prize. Read more about their work below, and congratulations on this much deserved honor!
Samantha Vortherms, Political Science
Social Sciences Associate Professor Research Award Recipient
Samantha Vortherms, political science, is this year’s recipient of the Social Sciences Associate Professor Research Award. The award was established in 2012 to recognize research excellence and project proposals by newly tenured faculty in social sciences. Vortherms’ research evaluates how processes of economic development affect state-society relations in non-democracies. Specifically, this award supports her second book project, Globalizing Authoritarian Welfare, which evaluates the effect of economic globalization on the welfare state in non-democracies. Methodologically and pedagogically, this award will also be used to create a best standards for the use of AI for document analysis in political science research for non-tech oriented graduate students and researchers.
With support from the award, Vortherms will advance research breaking down the two key concepts of “globalization” and “welfare state” to explain how nuanced variation in globalization affects who gets what forms of welfare from the state in China. Expanding access to welfare is both a function of breadth and depth redistribution. Similarly, economic globalization takes many forms and investors with different motivations for investing abroad will have different effects on government motivations to expand or restrict access to socio-economic rights. Her work argues that depth and breadth of redistribution are differentially affected by foreign investment depending on investment’s dependence on skilled labor and market orientation. By disaggregating both economic globalization and the different ways in which autocrats control redistribution, this project identifies multiple mechanisms connecting economic globalization and expansion of access to socio-economic rights.
In the process of evaluating and analyzing more than 8,000 local Chinese policy documents, this award will support her creation of a “how to” research note on the use of documentary analysis using AI tool, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of AI use in documentary analysis in the social sciences targeting social scientists who may not be particularly comfortable with using AI tools.
Vortherms earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, M.A. in international relations and A.M. in public policy at the University of Chicago, and B.A. from the University of Richmond. This project builds on Vortherms’ first book, Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship (Stanford University Press, 2024), developed while a Contemporary Asia Postdoctoral Fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.
Adaugo Pamela Nwakanma, Political Science
Social Sciences Assistant Professor Research Award Recipient
Adaugo Pamela Nwakanma, political science, is this year's Social Sciences Assistant Professor Research Award recipient. Established in 2005, the honor recognizes research excellence and a strong project proposal from a junior faculty member in the social sciences. Nwakanma's research examines how political entrepreneurs identify institutional gaps and strategically intervene to reshape governance, using technology, creative expression, and embodied practice to advance democratic accountability and community empowerment.
With support from the award, Nwakanma will conduct foundational research toward creating a Political Entrepreneurship Research Lab at UC Irvine. The lab will investigate why some efforts by political entrepreneurs translate into meaningful institutional change while others fall short, despite widespread impact and adoption. Nigeria serves as a key site for this work. As Africa's largest democracy, it has produced a wide range of entrepreneurial responses to governance challenges, from digital civic innovation to arts-based and movement-driven organizing. Yet these efforts have yielded mixed results in driving lasting accountability. Understanding this variation within a single context provides initial data to support the lab's broader comparative research agenda across emerging economies and advanced democracies alike. The project combines ethnographic fieldwork with computational analysis, forming the mixed-methods foundation that the lab will carry into future comparative work.
She is also developing a book project on gender, economic mobility, and political representation, building on her award-winning research on women's political empowerment. Her previous work has appeared in journals including Development, Perspectives on Politics, and Politics, Groups, and Identities, as well as in edited volumes such as Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline, the Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies, and Routledge’s African Scholars and Intellectuals in the North American Academy. Her work has also been featured in public media outlets such as The Republic, Black Perspectives, Break the Boxes, Collateral Benefits, and Voyages Africana.
Nwakanma earned her Ph.D. in government from Harvard University and her B.A. in international studies/economics and linguistics from UC San Diego. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and a Leading Edge Fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies before joining the UCI Department of Political Science in 2024.