In her research, Dissertation Year Fellow Shanna Corner (sociology) focuses on the relationships between religion, law, and international human rights norms.
As she works on her dissertation, she is examining how United Nations leaders and government officials who report on and review country implementation of international women’s rights standards conceptualize religion and its relationship to women’s rights in varying ways.
Through this analysis, Corner aims to heighten understanding about the nature of cultural models and related meaning-making processes that shape reporting and dialogue that takes place as part of the monitoring procedures used by United Nations treaty bodies.
She hopes her work will strengthen theorizing about how the factors she is studying impact global efforts to expand support for the cultural legitimacy of women’s rights standards as cultural norms.
Corner, who credits her 2015–16 Kellogg Dissertation Year Fellowship for its critical role in shaping her experience at Notre Dame, was recently awarded a 2017–18 Global Religion Research Initiative dissertation year fellowship to continue her research.
“The Department of Sociology and the centers housed within it and elsewhere across the University have engendered an invigorating and supportive intellectual community of faculty members and graduate students,” she said. “The Center for the Study of Religion and Society has been especially notable in bolstering my intellectual development and professionalization.”
Originally published at al.nd.edu.
The Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the University of Notre Dame’s new Keough School of Global Affairs, is an interdisciplinary community of scholars and students from across the University and around the world that promotes research, provides educational opportunities, and builds linkages related to two topics critical to our world—democracy and human development.