We are happy and proud to share the news from the ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research) that our postdoctoral researcher Dr Cherry Miller has been awarded the 2019 Joni Lovenduski PhD Prize in Gender and Politics. The prize has for the first time been awarded jointly and Cherry shares it with Dr Orly Siow.
These are the laudations from the prize committee:
“The Committee considered Cherry Miller’s PhD thesis Beneath the Spectacle: Gendering the Everyday in the British House of Commons to be an innovative piece of work that combines political science and ethnographic research to study how gendered norms are reproduced every day in the House of Commons. By pushing the boundaries of existing knowledge about daily informal gendered performative norms and practices in parliaments, the committee judged that her thesis advances theories of feminist institutionalism and political representation, and significantly contributes to gender and politics scholarly debates.
The study of informal gendered norms and practices of power and resistance against gender equality in institutional contexts demands that researchers develop new theoretical and methodological tools, such as those developed in this interdisciplinary thesis. Cherry’s work shows not only capacity to innovate but also reflexivity about theoretical, epistemological, and methodological issues. The parliamentary ethnography, based on primary research of participant observation and semi-structured interviews, allows her to collect empirical data about the daily performativity of gender that is repeated over time in the House of Commons.
Cherry’s thesis also proposes solutions for undoing the patterns of gendered working practices or entry points for change, reflecting on the difficulties for putting them in practice.”
Cherry’s PhD thesis is forthcoming as a monograph entitled Gendering the Everyday in the UK House of Commons: Beneath the Spectacle in Palgrave Macmillan’s Gender and Politics Book Series.
CONGRATULATIONS TO CHERRY!
We look forward to the celebrations in the European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPG) in Amsterdam in July 2019!