William Dinneen

About

I am an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in environmental history, international development, and data science. I am interested in using mixed-methods to explore shifting paradigms of environmental policy and law. In particular, I am interested in the securitization of environment, energy, and resources, and its implications for US, and transnational legal geographies.


Currently, I am a pre-doctoral data scientist at the PDRI-DevLab at the University of Pennsylvania, where I conduct research on social, political, and economic development.


Before Penn, I was a student at Emory University where I majored in History and International Studies, wrote a history thesis about the environmental restoration of a former nuclear weapon factory, and attempted to build a tech startup.

Published Work

- Book Review of Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (2022) by Jennie N. Shinozuka — Not Even Past, University of Texas, Austin — August, 2024 Jeannie Shinozuka's new book, Biotic Borders, is not only a “history of bugs and other bothers,” [209] but also a demonstration of how ecological actors played a fundamental role in shaping sociopolitical responses to Japanese immigration to the US from 1890-1950. The book shows how racialized invasive species furthered American nationalism in the name of biological security. The othering of invasive species along racial lines and legitimate alarm over environmental destruction contributed to the consolidation of American biotic borders.
- The Restoration of Rocky Flats: The Environmental Legacy of a Nuclear Bomb Factory — Emory Theses & Dissertations — May, 2023 This thesis examines the political formation and the environmental cleanup of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, a former nuclear weapons site located near Denver, Colorado. From 1996 to 2006, the United States Department of Energy worked with a private contractor to remediate the area, and by 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency deemed the cleanup complete, transferring ownership of the site to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Both the political process behind the conversion and the subsequent cleanup were fraught with controversy due to political battles over the distribution of radioactive waste, public fears over shifting safety standards, and general distrust in the nuclear industry and government regulators. This study unravels the social, political, and environmental layers of Rocky Flats, revealing how the legacy of ecologically valuable military sites can be complicated by their history.
- Nuclear Rhetoric in The Ukraine Crisis: Behavioral Mechanisms Behind the Stability-Instability Paradox — Emory Undergraduate Research Journal — May, 2023 Given a nuclear saber, what are the effects of its rattle? The Stability-Instability theory of nuclear deterrence suggests that nuclear weapons paradoxically lead to increased strategic stability while creating tactical instability. This study aims to explore how problem representation can drive such behavior. Does problem representation, namely the presence of nuclear rhetoric, impact decision-making? This study uses a survey experiment to test the effect of nuclear rhetoric on US policy responses to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Although results fail to show significant support for the effects of nuclear rhetoric on policy-specific outcomes, they do show that the presence of nuclear rhetoric increases perceptions of threat and increases support for ambiguous but more extreme responses. These findings demonstrate real effects of nuclear rhetoric on perception and opinion but give limited insight into policy-specific choices.
- Terror In Island Shanghai (1937-1941): Understanding Anti-Japanese Violence in Wartime-Shanghai Using Modern Frameworks of Terrorism — Emory Journal of Asian Studies — May, 2022 Following the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in 1937, Chinese Nationalists executed a four-year program of brutal anti-Japanese assassinations within the city limits. Foreign inhabitants watched helplessly as the Japanese responded with ruthless puppet police forces and tightened their grip on the city. To protect the fragile neutrality of foreign powers in Shanghai, the Nationalists were labeled as “terrorists” rather than as soldiers participating in the Second Sino-Japan War. The Japanese wielded this terrorist terminology to legitimize their aggression. As a result, Shanghai devolved into a cesspool of disorganized crime rackets and political discord, yet it avoided becoming a war zone until Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The characterization of the Nationalists as “terrorists” contributed to this persistent neutrality as the term was used as a political tool by both Japanese and foreign powers. Modern academic understandings of terrorism agree with classifying these assassinations as terrorism. As the Shanghai case demonstrates, this classification has immediate political significance and can be used to prevent the outbreak of genuine war.

Ongoing Projects

- Does the hidden college contribute to a gender gap in academic success? — with Guy Grossman (UPenn), Shuning Ge (MIT), and Sandra González-Bailón (UPenn) — 2024 Across disciplines, a gender gap in academic success---measured as the number of publications, journal placement, and citation counts---has long been documented. A parallel Scientometrics literature has documented the substantial importance of embeddedness in informal professional networks for academic success, using acknowledgments in publications as novel measures of such embeddedness. Combining these hitherto disjoint strands of research, we investigate 1 the effect of embeddedness in informal collaboration networks on academic success; 2 whether gender differences in network embeddedness exist; and ultimately 3 the extent to which informal collaboration network embeddedness can account for gender gaps in academic success. To explore these questions, we collected detailed information on 95,662 unique scholars (including both authors and commentors) from 152,580 peer-reviewed articles published in 185 political science journals from 2003 to 2023. We construct network measures at both the ego-centric and meso-scale levels to capture scholars positions in political science's informal collaboration network. With this project, we improve our understanding of academic gender disparities as well as of the gendered nature of network embeddedness as a correlate of academic success.
- From Mirrors to Voices: Descriptive to Substantive Representation of Ethnic Minority MPs — with Guy Grossman (UPenn), Stephanie Zonszein (UC Berkeley), and Apurav Bhatiya (UBirmingham) — 2024 A growing body of work shows that ethnic and racial minority MPs are more likely to represent their group's interests compared to majority MPs. However, it is unclear whether this is due to intrinsic motivation or electoral incentives. This study uses a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to analyze the increase in minorities representation in the UK parliament after 2010. By comparing white MPs who narrowly beat minority candidates to minority MPs who narrowly beat white candidates, the RDD controls for electoral incentives since it holds constant unobserved constituency factors correlated with a minority parliamentary win. Analyzing over 350,000 parliamentary speech records and ove 1,000,000 written parliamentary questions, we analyze whether minority MPs are more likely to discuss issues important to ethnic minorities.
- Climate Change, Mosquitos, and Public Health in Brazil — With Guy Grossman (UPenn), Carlos Schmidt-Padilla (UC Berkeley), and Alice Xu (UPenn) — 2024 This study investigates the relationship between climate change and environmental voting in Brazil by analyzing a decade of hospital records for mosquito-borne diseases such as Dengue, Zika, Malaria, and Chikungunya. By combining these health records with satellite climate data over the same period, the study examines whether rising temperatures, which affect mosquito populations, also influence political behavior towards the environment.

As A Research Assistant

- Dataset of World Refugee and Asylum Policies (DWRAP) — Christopher Blair (Princeton), Guy Grossman (UPenn), and Jeremy M. Weinstein (UPenn) — 2024
- Broadcasting Tolerance: Using Radio to Promote Inclusion of Marginalized Groups in Kenya — Guy Grossman (UPenn), Yotam Margalit (Tel Aviv), Erik Wibbels (UPenn), Carolina Torreblanca (UPenn) — 2024
- Reducing Human Trafficking Vulnerabilities Caused by Climate Change-Induced Migration in Bangladesh — Guy Grossman (UPenn), Dev Patel (Harvard), Carlos Schmidt-Padilla (UC Berkeley), Harsha Thirumurthy (UPenn), Catalina Udani (UPenn), and Nudrat Faria — 2024
- When Does the Public Care About Immigration? Studying the Political Salience of Venezuelan Immigration in Colombia — Natalia S. Bueno (Emory), Daniel Masterson (UC Santa Barbra), and Daniel Rojas (UBC) — 2023
- The Liar's Dividend: Can Politicians Use Misinformation to Evade Accountability? — Natalia S. Bueno (Emory), Kaylyn Schiff (Purdue), and Daniel Schiff (Purdue) — 2023

Contact

wdinneen@upenn.edu

github