Former Doctoral Fellow Margaret Perez Brower Looks Back on Impact of Pozen Center Support

As a UChicago PhD candidate finishing her dissertation and preparing for the academic job market, the political scientist Margaret Perez Brower had two overlapping goals. First, she wanted to make her dissertation – on the subject of “intersectional advocacy” and its relevance to fighting gender-based violence – as good as possible. At the same time, she hoped to lay the groundwork for its second life as her first book. 

“On both of those fronts, I got invaluable assistance from the Pozen Center,” Perez Brower recalls. As a 2020-21 Human Rights Doctoral Fellow, she received input on her research and writing from other doctoral candidates across the disciplines. “They connected me to so many different ways of thinking about gendered violence and human rights more broadly. And that really raised the standard of my work.”

Alongside the intellectual stimulation of her fellowship cohort, Perez Brower – currently a assistant professor at the University of Washington – also benefited from a Pozen Graduate Research Grant, which enabled her to conduct research beyond the scope of her dissertation, helping to elevate it into book form. 

Intersectional advocacy, the core concept of Perez Brower’s dissertation, refers to advocacy strategies that reflect the experience of people marginalized across more than one of their identities, such as their gender, race, ethnicity, or class. Perez Brower was interested in steps that leaders in the world of policy advocacy took to make their organizations’ approaches to making their work more intentionally intersectional (and, as a result, more effective). For her dissertation, she had conducted some archival research on this front. But this approach was limited by the fact that many of the smaller, more innovative, and less well-funded organizations addressing gender-based violence are less visible in the record of legislative processes.

Perez Brower’s research grant enabled her to conduct interviews with 45 leaders of gender-based violence advocacy groups, asking them directly about the strategies and tactics they’d used in their attempts to make their organizations tactics’ more intersectional. The funds paid for her to have these interviews transcribed, which in turn made it possible for Perez Brower to analyze them for points of commonality. When she transformed her dissertation into a book, these interviews became the basis of an entire chapter, significantly boosting the book’s usefulness to readers looking to apply intersectional techniques to their own organizations.

“This was such an important addition to the book,” Perez Brower says. “If I’d relied on archives alone, I would have missed so many grassroots leaders. I ended up with a much more in-depth understanding of how people do this work.”

Toward the end of Perez Brower’s fellowship year, Pozen Center Executive Director Kathleen Cavanaugh invited two editors from academic presses to meet with the cohort. These editors offered guidance on the nuts and bolts of the publishing process, including how to think about the difference between a dissertation and a book, write a proposal, and submit a book for publication.

Thanks to this advice, Perez Brower recalls, she was “able to hit the ground running, and get my book into the world much faster than I would have otherwise."

Perez Brower will present her book at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore on Nov 12  at 6 p.m., in conversation with Cathy Cohen, the chair of UChicago's Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity.  (Register.)

• Learn more about the Pozen Center's Human Rights Doctoral Fellowship.