The Women and Politics Working Group has been active in the School of Politics and Global Studies since 2013. Within the working group, we have a large group of scholars whose research focuses on women’s role in politics, including:
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- Kim Fridkin
- Magda Hinojosa
- Valerie Hoekstra
- Jennet Kirkpatrick
- Miki Kittilson
- Sarah Shair-Rosenfield
- Reed Wood
- Gina Woodall.
In addition to these core members of the working group, we have a number of faculty members who have previously or are currently doing research on women and politics (e.g., Carolyn Warner, Richard Herrera, Reed Wood).
The research of working group members crosses geographical borders (e.g., Europe, Latin America, United States) as well as disciplines (e.g., political science, communications, psychology) and methods (e.g., surveys, aggregate analysis, content analysis, experiments, elite interviews).
In 2013, the Women and Politics Working Group won the inaugural SPGS Annual Conference Competition and held a successful conference with national and international participants in April of 2014. The conference, “Women, Media, and Politics: A Comparative Perspective” explored the media’s potential impact on women’s role in politics within a comparative perspective. Papers delivered at the conference explored both traditional and new media coverage of women in the United States and around the world. A group of papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of Politics & Gender shortly.
In 2014, three members (Magda Hinojosa, Miki Kittilson and Kim Fridkin) of the working group received a USAID award to study symbolic representation through a “natural experiment” in Uruguay. Based on interest in symbolic representation, the working group proposed and secured funding for a second conference “Symbolic Representation? Groups and Representation in Contemporary Democratic Politics” which will take place in February of 2016 at Arizona State University. While negotiations are preliminary, the editor of the journal, Politics, Groups, and Identities will publish a special issue of the journal devoted to the proceedings of the conference.