Dr Meryl Kenny - orcid.org/0000-0002-0455-1219
Sabbatical Fellow, August - October 2022
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Dr Meryl Kenny is Senior Lecturer in Gender and Politics at the University of Edinburgh; Co-Director of the Centre on Constitutional Change; and Co-Director of the Feminism and Institutionalism International Network. She has published widely in the areas of gender and political institutions, political representation and recruitment, and Scottish politics. Meryl convenes the University of Edinburgh’s Gender Politics Research Group; sits on the steering group of the University's genderED initiative; and is a member of the steering group of the cross-party Women5050 campaign for legal gender quotas in Scotland.
Project title: Gender and the Scottish Parliament at (almost) 25
During her time at IASH, Meryl will be working on a project on gender, institutions and the core executive in Scotland, drawing on documents, media sources, and interviews to explore how ministers experience and navigate the demands, rules and rituals of central government. Concurrently, she will be developing a new large-scale research project looking at accountability, representation and law-making in the Scottish Parliament over time. Across both projects, her interests revolve around questions of how new (gendered) institutions are instantiated following processes of constitutional and institutional restructuring by (gendered) actors using formal and informal rules, and in exploring how the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ interplay to open up and constrain possibilities for change.