PhD Student: Victoria Hasson
Details
email : v.hasson@sheffield.ac.uk
Thesis Title: Gendered Ceremony and Rituals in Parliament: Disciplining Representation
(The Leverhulme Trust Programme)
Start Year: 2007
Supervisors
Georgina Waylen and Garrett Brown
Research Topic
The programme seeks to encourage work which, freed from conventional disciplinary constraints, can afford a wider recognition of the place of ceremony and ritual within the human condition. It will analyze the ways in which ceremony and rituals are racialised and gendered in three political institutions: the British, South African and Indian Parliaments. You will be working on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in the UK Parliament (Westminster).
This four year comparative project will inquire into how the socialisation of marginalised groups through the performativity of ceremony and ritual within institutions, such as parliaments, secures the elite status of these groups on the one hand, and perpetuates their peripheral position as political actors on the other. Ritual and ceremony are largely ignored in the contemporary study of parliament, which is dominated by political scientists mainly concerned with policy making and effectiveness in holding the executive to account. The project compares the Indian, South African and UK legislatures over time and space. Its focus is on how representative institutions operate through evolving repertoires of ritual and ceremony which control the members (performance) and signify their function to the public (audience).
The research questions for this programme are:
- What are the formal and informal rules and norms of the Parliament? How are they expressed and transmitted?
- How do parliamentary rituals and ceremonies discipline MPs?
- What are the dominant forms of the public behaviour of elected representatives?
- To what extent are these racialised and sexualized?
- How do dominant notions of appropriate public behaviour affect the representativeness of legislatures?
Academic Profile
- 2006-2007 University College London MSc International Public Policy.
- 2001-2005 The University of Nottingham, BA (Hons) Hispanic and Latin American Studies.