Christianna Parr

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Washington, Seattle. I have a Bachelors and a Masters in Political Science from the University of Washington. You can access my CV here.

My research interests are primarily concerned with the issues facing civil society organizations across Southeast Asia. I research how environmental non-governmental organizations (eNGOs) and the non-profit sector function in restrictive regime environments. My research lies at the intersection of non-profit/NGO studies and comparative politics. 

My three paper dissertation focuses on the perceptions of NGOs in the Southeast Asia region. In the first paper I use the Asian Barometer data to determine how social media effects trust in institutions across the Southeast Asia region. I use hierarchal modelling to determine whether social media usage effects trust in institutions like civil society organizations and national and local government. In the second paper I use experimental methods to study the preferences of donors with regards to eNGOs across Southeast Asia. I implement a conjoint experiments across Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore to determine what NGO attributes donors prefer. I find that donors are more likely to donate to NGOs with robust gender representation on their boards and local partnerships. In the third chapter, I use data scrapping techniques and construct an original dataset of articles on eNGOs from six Southeast Asian newspapers. I conduct topic modelling and sentiment analysis on this corpus to determine changes in perceptions of eNGOs across time and during climate relevant events. 

My research has been funded by grants from the Center of Social Impact Strategy at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington’s Center for Environmental Politics, as well as the University of Washington Department of Political Science’s Kizhanatham Jagannathan Research Grant, among others. 

​

In addition to my research, I have been a teaching assistant for courses on comparative and world politics, international relations, political economy, research methods and environmental politics. I received the University of Washington, Department of Political Science’s Best Teaching Assistant Award in 2018. I have mentored several students through the UW Honor's Program and have been a committee member and advisor for thesis projects. 

​

I held the graduate chair of the University of Washington's Center for Environmental Politics in 2019-2020, and I am a Richard B. Wesley Fellow in Environmental Politics. 

​

Outside of academia I enjoy hiking in the Pacific Northwest, cooking my traditional Isan food and learning how to bake.