Agustina S. Paglayan Wins Award for the Best Paper in Political Science

Agustina S. Paglayan, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, has received the 2023 Heinz I. Eulau Award from the American Political Science Association. She is being recognized for the best article published in the American Political Science Review.

Her award-winning article is entitled “Education or Indoctrination? The Violent Origins of Public School Systems in an Era of State-Building.” In the article, she argues that state actors saw educational expansion not primarily as a distributive good or a source of human capital development but as a form of indoctrination that had the potential to strengthen social control. The award committee stated that “the paper provides important new resources to scholars asking critical questions about the nature of public goods provision and political order, through careful engagement with, and production of, historical data. In sum, the paper provides crucial insights into the origins of mass education systems and spurs on an important new research agenda.”

Dr. Paglayan, who joined the faculty in 2018, holds a joint appointment at the School of Global Policy and the department of political science at the University of California, San Diego. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development and a faculty affiliate with the Policy Design and Evaluation Lab at the university. She is the author of Countering Disobedience: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Dr. Paglayan is a graduate of the Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina. She holds a master of public policy degree from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a master’s degree in educational policy and a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.