Shannon Drysdale Walsh

In 2011 Shannon Drysdale Walsh received a nonresidential grant from the Special Fund to conduct interviews for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Notre Dame, “Engendering State Institutions: State Response to Violence against Women in Latin America.” From May 3 through June 6, she conducted field research in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica and conducted in-depth interviews with more than 20 individuals working in civil society, the state, and international organizations. The grant she received was timely and allowed her to integrate the research into her dissertation that she successfully defended in July 2011. She is now a tenure track assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

As Walsh wrote in her dissertation, “all Central American states have constructed some specialized police units that address violence against women. However, the lives of victims (often literally) depend upon how these institutions function. In Latin America, policing practices have traditionally undermined, rather than strengthened, women's rights.” Her research challenges were daunting as police, shelters, and crisis centers do not share lists of victims to interview. Some reports are written by nongovernmental organizations pointing to problems within the police. However, no internal or external audits compare parallel aspects of police performance in the countries under study. Further, no statistics are collected on police services other than tracking how many and the types of cases that have been reported to the police.

To measure police practices in the three Central American countries, she performed a survey of experts asking them to assess certain relevant aspects of police performance. She also attended several conferences where police performance was discussed during individual presentations and on a more casual basis. She also conducted open-ended interviews with several individuals who work within the police, work closely with the police, or had extensive experience working with victims.

She recently submitted a book proposal based on her dissertation to several university presses. She received Grant In Aid funding from the university to expand on her survey and increase the sample size to be included in the book manuscript. She was also awarded a residential fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities for the fall of 2012 to revise the manuscript.

Kerry Crawford

A supplemental nonresidential grant from the Rita Mae Kelly Endowment Fellowship was made in 2012 to Kerry Crawford, a George Washington University political science doctoral candidate. The core of her dissertation was the question “Why do some cases of sexual predation in armed conflict evoke strong responses from international actors while other instances do not?” She used an eclectic mix of disciplinary approaches including archival research including official reports, texts, and communiqués; interviews, and quantitative analysis to study the international response to armed conflicts involving sexual predation from the start of the Cold War until the present. She argued that despite nongovernmental and international organizations' success in constructing a form condemning wartime sexual predation at the end of the twentieth century, persistent variation in state responses to wartime sexual predation in the last decade signals a gap between the international norm and national policies and practices.

Ms. Crawford used the Centennial Center grant to facilitate travel to New York City to conduct interviews with personnel working in the nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations discussed in her dissertation. She had collected most of the documents needed from the United Nations Official Document System online prior to her travels. She was able to meet with UN personnel and a member of the nongovernmental organization community working on the legal issues surrounding sexual violence in war. She plans to spend the summer completing interviews in Washington, DC, and a final collection of documents from the Library of Congress and the National Archives.