The process of changing harmful social norms depends on coordinated change preceded by sustained values deliberations in the community, typically non-formal human rights education (HRE).  The content of those deliberations, and how they work to bring about change, however, was unknown.  Mackie, with Ben Cislaghi (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), and Diane Gillespie (University of Washington), undertook two years of field study in Senegal and three years of data analysis and theoretical reflection to answer these questions. The resulting study, Values Deliberations and Collective Action:  Community Empowerment in Rural Senegal was published in 2016 by Palgrave Macmillan.

Ideas developed in the Senegal study led Cislaghi and Mackie to join with established HRE scholar Monisha Bajaj (University of San Francisco) to research and produce the 2016 policy report, ​Advancing Transformative Human Rights Education for the Global Citizenship Commission.  The report was extremely well-received by external reviewers, world leaders in the field, and prompted an international research agenda to formalize an association.