Grain of Sand Award Winner 2016: Mary Hawkesworth
Winner: Mary Hawkesworth (Rutgers University)
Some time in the early 1990s, in discussing the possible creation of a journal in what was coming to be called interpretive policy analysis, one of that field’s leading scholars observed about Mary Hawkesworth’s 1988 Theoretical Issues in Policy Analysis, that her having written it meant that the rest of us didn’t have to. Deconstructing his comment, we can see some of the aspects of Mary’s work for which we are celebrating her today:
- the quality of her scholarship: prescient and incisive critique, lucid writing, historical and empirical groundedness, and a generosity toward others’ work (even as she critiques it);
- her foresightedness: Even as Mary thinks deeply about how contemporary events and scholarship reflect past historical struggles, her work looks forward to the possibility of a reconfigured future, one that is more just and more humane;
- her pioneering spirit—boldly going where no woman, or man, has gone before!
That 1988 book laid the foundations for a robust critique of traditional ways of thinking about policy studies and analysis. Drawing on her fundamental grasp of the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of cost-benefit analysis and other policy-analytic techniques that were then in vogue, the book’s first four chapters engage the positivist presuppositions concerning social realities and objective understanding. She also took up the presumption that one’s a priori knowledge and what today is called positionality could simply be parked at the door as one embarked on a policy research project. The subsequent four chapters illustrate the application of an alternative to positivist-informed inquiry, known today as interpretive policy analysis.
Over the subsequent three decades, Mary has taken these methodological and philosophical concerns into the world of what might be called “applied” feminist critique—examining strategies for overcoming oppression (Beyond Oppression: Feminist Theory and Political Strategy, 1990), for engaging public policy (Feminism and Public Policy, a Special Double Issue of Policy Sciences, 1994), and such topics as globalization, democratization and women (the 2001 Gender, Globalization and Democratization, co-edited with Rita Mae Kelly, Jane Bayes and Brigitte Young; also translated into Romanian; the co-authored 2006 Women, Democracy and Globalization in North America), feminist activism (Globalization and Feminist Activism, 2006), war and terror (the co-edited War and Terror: Feminist Perspectives in 2008), and governance (two editions of the co-edited Routledge Encyclopedia of Government and Politics). And that list is not exhaustive! Her journal articles and book chapters have examined topics as diverse as the Soviet response to human rights critiques, the functions of prostitution, workfare in welfare policy, violence in Kampuchea, affirmative action, sexual harassment, gender in the public sphere, the George W. Bush administration, and discursive politics in development policy and planning.
With respect to the specific substantive domains recognized by the Grain of Sand award, Mary has brought her talents and sensibilities to two areas. The first of these, in conceptual rather than chronological order, is the actual practice of analyzing public policies and related political processes, to which she has brought a meaning-focused sensitivity to the “positioned” concerns of feminist work. Perhaps of special note in this regard, in addition to the 1988 book mentioned above, is her article in the American Political Science Review. “Congressional Enactments of Race–Gender,” which subsequently won the 2003 Heinz Eulau Prize for Best Paper Published in APSR, brought gender and race into the heart of what had often been a rather disembodied understanding of institutions and policy making. Drawing on existing interviews with Congressional women of color, Mary demonstrates the concrete practices that disempower and marginalize these representatives, belying easy narratives of neutrality and equality of representation.
The second area on which we might elaborate is her extensive writings on feminist inquiry, from a 2006 book by that name (Feminist Inquiry: From Methodological Conviction to Methodological Innovation), to chapters on positivist and interpretive methodological presuppositions in both editions of Interpretation and Methods (2006, revised 2014), to the 2016 Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory co-edited with Lisa Disch. Her chapter from Feminist Inquiry on “Evidence Blindness” is essential reading for making sense of the current Presidential electoral campaign and an example of “prescient critique,” one of the qualities of her scholarship noted above.
In sum, Mary is the consummate scholar—someone for whom academia is, in a sense that is increasingly old-fashioned in the neoliberal university, a vocation. She publishes solo-authored journal articles and book chapters (in, e.g., Signs, Political Theory, APSR, PRQ, Politics and Gender, NWSA Journal) and monographs, but she also edits and co-edits volumes—understanding, as Sandra Harding has remarked, that such efforts build epistemic communities. Her decade-long editorship of Signs (2005-2015) and the newly published Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory testify to the trust and esteem of her colleagues, with whom she has built an interdisciplinary, intellectual community committed to rigorous, inclusive knowledge for a globalizing world.
But we’re not quite done yet. Mary walks the walk, enacting and modeling her commitment to a more diverse world when it comes to service and mentoring—whether in academia (as Department chair—twice!, Director of Graduate Studies, Director of the Center for American Women and Politics) or in her work for women and community, from Kentucky to Vietnam. She takes teaching very seriously, in all its forms. Her methods-related courses include “Epistemology [and Politics],” “Feminist Genealogies,” “Feminist Methodologies,” and “Feminist Knowledge Production.” We mention but one of her publications here—the 2013 Feminist Practices: Signs on the Syllabus, intended as a classroom resource. And more than that. In person, she has long made it a practice to guide and mentor newer scholars. Here, we can only rest on anecdotal evidence, as we have found no compendium of those she has guided, although her long list of awards includes three for mentoring excellence, among them one for Latino junior faculty and another for leadership in diversity. Three individual stories may best communicate Mary’s light touch:
Peri Schwartz-Shea (University of Utah):
Sometime in the early 2000s, I was on a very well-attended roundtable with Mary on Bent Flyvbjerg’s book, Making Social Science Matter, which in those heady days of Perestroika was getting a lot of attention. I was very much in transition, intellectually, trying to find my way out of the rational choice, experimental paradigm in which I had been trained (and on the basis of which I had attained tenure, but was increasingly finding suffocating) to something more useful for understanding the world. Looking out at all the people in the audience, and feeling underprepared and very nervous, I gave what I felt were rather scattered remarks on my current thinking on the limits of rational choice and the possibilities for methodological pluralism. Yet after the panel, Mary made sure to take the time to encourage me to write up my ideas, and eventually the piece was published as “Conundrums in the Practice of Pluralism” in Sandy Schram and Brian Caterino’s 2006 co-edited volume, Making Political Science Matter. I’m not sure that book chapter could have happened without Mary’s encouraging word, conveying to me that I had something worthwhile to contribute to the debates.
Lee Ann Fujii (University of Toronto):
I first met Mary at APSA when I was a PhD student in 2005. I was one of several people at a large group dinner, which included Mary and several other senior scholars.
Fast forward seven years. It was Thanksgiving morning, 2012. By that time, I was an assistant professor applying for fellowships. One of the fellowships I wanted to apply for was the Ford, which is aimed at increasing diversity in the academy. For this application, I needed to designate a mentor who would host me for the fellowship year. The only person I could think to ask was Mary Hawkesworth, because she had recently hired a Ford fellow whom I knew. I wrote to ask Mary if she would agree to serve as my Ford mentor, not expecting a reply because of the holiday. But within moments, a reply came. Mary readily agreed to serve. I was floored and honored by her quick response.
When I arrived at Rutgers, Mary put me in touch with many different people, including the faculty member who was organizing the weekly seminar in the Political Science department. When I gave my talk, Mary was unable to attend because of an accident, but a couple other people I knew came and took me to lunch afterwards. At the lunch table, the four of us—three junior faculty of color and one graduate student—began talking about who had had the biggest impact on us, both intellectually and professionally. Each of us said, “Mary Hawkesworth.” We toasted Mary and laughed at how all four of us had named her. Even in her absence, Mary was present and still making a difference.
Stephen Marshall (University of Texas):
I would not be in the profession today, quite frankly, were it not for Mary Hawkesworth. I got to know Mary as a returning undergraduate at The University of Louisville in 1991. Having enrolled in her Modern Political Thought course, I was quickly captivated by Mary’s brilliant, provocative, and welcoming lectures on some of the most uninviting material I had ever encountered. On some days, I left Mary’s class quite simply in awe of her capacious and powerful intellect. On other days, I left her class genuinely excited to wrestle with luminaries of the modern political philosophic canon. On still other days, I left office hours with Mary empowered to dispense with old self conceptions and embrace new and quite different senses of myself as a serious and promising student. Through her teaching, example, and guidance, Mary opened my eyes to the rewards of intellectual pursuits and facilitated that “turning of the soul” which set me on the path I happily continue on today.
Subsequently, Mary not only supervised my senior thesis, she also inspired and guided me as I applied for and won a previously unthinkable two-year fellowship to study at Oxford University. Many years later when I was an anxious junior faculty member fretting about my tenure prospects, Mary helped me to pull my ideas together and conceive my book, each chapter of which Mary was the first to read. In sum, I can say without exaggeration that my success within the academy would be inconceivable were it not for the presence and support of Mary Hawkesworth at almost every stage of my intellectual and professional career.
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In sum, Mary is a superb scholar and intellectual who serves as an example to all of us, and so it is fitting that we present her with the 2016 Grain of Sand Award, which celebrates “a political scientist whose contributions to interpretive studies of the political, and, indeed, to the discipline itself, its ideas, and its persons, have been longstanding and merit special recognition.” And since we are here at the annual American Political Science Association conference, we thank her for never giving up on political science—she is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, albeit within the latter department—even as she pushes incessantly for interdisciplinary theorizing and practice. We understand that she is planning to retire in a year’s time, and whereas her winding down from associational and journal activities will surely leave an enormous hole in the communities in which she circulates, we wish her many more years of rewarding engagements with people and ideas.
