We are able to report the exceptionally good news that Lauren Tooker, a former PAIS PhD student and now an IAS Early Career Fellow, has been awarded the ECPR Jean Blondel Prize for Best PhD. This is a Europe-wide PhD prize, and huge congratulations must go to Lauren on such a tremendous achievement.

The news is now live on the ECPR website, including the commendations of the prize jury. Lauren’s thesis was entitled, ‘Ordinary Democracy: Reading Resistance to Debt after the Global Financial Crisis with Stanley Cavell’s Ordinary Language Philosophy’.

Using a theoretical approach rooted in Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy, Lauren’s thesis shows how ordinary democratic subjects are opposing debt-based economic citizenship in the UK and the US. The study's central argument is that debt’s ordinary democrats are reconstructing debt relations as a site of democratic selfhood and community in finance, thus representing important practices of civic freedom.

Lauren was a GEM School PhD student funded through our Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Programme. She was supervised through her degree at Warwick by Lena Rethel, James Brassett and Matthew Watson, and at the Université Libre de Bruxelles by Firouzeh Nahavandi. She was examined by Paul Langley (Durham), Amandine Crespy (ULB) and Mike Saward (Warwick).