Departmental News

Posted:  Aug 03, 2017 - 12:00am

Melina Juárez was recently awarded APSA's Kenneth Sherrill Prize, which recognizes the best doctoral dissertation proposal for an empirical study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) topics in political science. The purpose of this prize is to encourage and enable empirical work on LGBT topics by graduate students, and to broaden the recognition of this work within political science.

Melina plans to defend her dissertation, “Queering Latinidad: Latinx Politics Beyond Nativity,” in May of 2018. Her dissertation seeks to understand how concepts of non-binary gender and sexual orientation became subverted within the Latinx identity and what this subversion has meant for public policy schemes targeting the Latinx community. Additionally, she aims to investigate if there are differences between heterosexual Latinxs and LGBTQI Latinxs in terms of political behavior and public opinion. This is planned as a mixed-methods study with a national survey component and focus groups at five national sites (Washington D.C., New York City, Miami, San Francisco, and Chicago). Her dissertation project highlights a largely ignored sector of the Latinx population (the LGBTQI community) and fundamentally challenges many assumptions of Latinidad and Latinx political science research.