Hello and welcome!
My name is Dakota Thomas, and I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kentucky, where I study comparative politics and international relations. My research focuses on gender and women in politics. In particular, I am interested in understanding women's political participation through protest and voting.
My dissertation applies and adapts the logic of repression and dissent to women's protests, showing that negative state actions can be a powerful motivator for women's protests, but that the type of repression matters, and repression is gendered in many ways. Using the Latin American region as a case study, I use both country and individual level analyses to substantiate my argument. My secondary line of research focuses on women's participation and the role of women's suffrage. I focus on both individual support for women's suffrage historically and the institutional contexts in which suffrage was being adopted, arguing that both are important for explaining why women get the vote. To that end, I was awarded a grant from the Office of Policy Studies on Violence Against Women (OPSVAW) in 2015 to facilitate research on the topic of gendered political institutions and their consequences for democracy as a whole. In addition, I have served as an instructor and teaching assistant for many classes at the University of Kentucky. Currently, I am managing the academic component of the University of Kentucky's brand new D.C. internship program, "Wildcats in the Capitol". In that capacity, I teach two courses that our students take while they serve as interns on Capitol Hill. The first is PS 391-01 - Identity and the Practice of Politics, which focuses on how aspects of personal identity (gender, race, etc.) affect careers in politics. I also teach PS 391-02 - Professional Development in the Federal Workforce, a class that aids students in their efforts at professionalization and career advancement here in DC. Last year, I served as the teaching assistant for our graduate student methods sequence, which all new political science and sociology graduate students are required to take. This sequence is composed of two classes (PS 572 - Introduction to Quantitative Methods and PS 672 - Advanced Quantitative Methods) that give new graduate students the applied statistical skills and STATA background required by our department. I have also previously served as both primary instructor and teaching assistant for both PS 101 - American Politics and PS 210 - Comparative Politics. |