Professor Fiona Mackay
Details of Professor Fiona Mackay's inaugural lecture.
Event details
Lecture title: “Nested Newness” and the Gendered Limits of Institutional Change
Date: 20 May 2014
Time: 5.15pm
Venue: Business School Auditorium, University of Edinburgh Business School, 29 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9JS
Lecture abstract
Opportunities for feminist reform are created by the chance to be in at the start of new or substantially revised institutions of local and global governance. In theory, successful interventions to insert new actors, new values and new rules may profoundly influence the future developments of an institution by “locking in” elements of gender equality and gender justice, thus counteracting historic gender power imbalances and promoting women’s human rights. In practice, outcomes are mixed. This lecture suggests that we need to pay more attention to examining and theorizing newness and processes of change. It uses the concept of “nested newness” to examine the promise and limit of institutional innovation. Drawing upon examples ranging from the Scottish parliament to the United Nations, it asks why gender reforms appear so vulnerable to regress and what can we do to make change “stick”?