DR. RACHEL HUBER
One of the two winners of the 2023 Brigitte-Schnegg Prize is Dr. Rachel Huber. She is the author of the book «Die Frauen der Red-Power-Bewegung. Die Bedeutung von Born-digital-Selbstzeugnissen für unsichtbare Akteurinnen in der Erinnerungskultur». (“The Women of the Red Power Movement. The importance of born-digital self-testimonies for invisible female actors in memory culture”)
Rachel Huber studied Cultural Studies in Lucerne and Global History at the University of Excellence in Hamburg. She worked as a research assistant and completed her doctorate with a focus on intersectional digital history, (digital) cultures of memory and discrimination history in the USA and Switzerland from 2016-2021 at the University of Lucerne at the chair of Prof. Dr. Aram Mattioli. From 2022 to 2023 she worked, also at the Department of History at the University of Lucerne, as a senior assistant and project manager. From 2018-2020, she was a member of the editorial board of the open access journal “Public History Weekly,”, and from 2022 to 2023 she managed the third-party funded project “Auslegeordnung Erinnerungskultur Zürich.” The research contract was awarded by the Presidential Department of Zurich. Since September, she has been an associate researcher in the Digital Humanities at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg of the University of Bern.
Short summary of the book:
In her book “The Women of the Red Power Movement. The importance of born-digital self-testimonies for invisible female actors in memory culture,” Rachel Huber illuminates a hitherto little-known side of Indigenous resistance in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s: the side of women. The established narrative on Red Power largely ignores women and their achievements. Huber followed the traces of historical female actors who still live and therefore are contemporary witnesses on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and compared them with the traces in analogue archives in the USA and Europe. In doing so, she wrote a history with and “against” archives.
Using this case study, she explored how discriminated populations and invisible historical female actors can be inscribed in established meta narratives so that they become part of the culture of memory and make it more plural. She was also able to show with her research that digital-born-self-testimonies as important new historical sources can bring to light stories that cannot be opened up with analogue sources alone, and explains what needs to be considered when dealing with such born-digital data.
DR. FIONA FRIEDLI
The other winner of this year's Brigitte Schnegg Prize is Dr. Fiona Friedli. She is the author of the thesis « Régulation des relations familiales et reproduction de l'ordre de genre : des transformations du droit à la justice en action » (Regulating Divorce, reproducing Gender: Understanding Inequality in Family Law Proceedings).
Fiona Friedli holds a Ph.D in Political Science from the Université of Lausanne. Her research lies at the intersection of sociolegal studies, gender studies and political sociology. She is a SNF Senior researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lausanne and the Scientific coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Platform in Gender Studies. She spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Department of Sociology of Northwestern University in Chicago. She is the co-founder of the Swiss Network for Law and Society. She is involved in developing a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Gender Studies. Beside her academic activities, she is an assessor at the Tribunal de Prud’hommes de l’administration cantonale vaudoise.
Short summary of the thesis:
Taking a constitutive approach to law, this study uncovers the origins of the trend towards formal equality in Family law as well as the growing phenomenon of coparenting. The thesis investigates how the new norms on divorce and post-separation parenting calling for equal treatment among parents contribute to the reproduction of a gender order despite their apparent neutrality. The empirical research combines sociohistorical, statistical and ethnographic methods to analyze, on the one hand, the main reforms of family law between 1907 and 2017 and, on the other hand, judges’ practices in Family law proceedings at several scales of the Court system: a Child Protection Authority, a Court of first instance, a Cantonal Court, and the Federal Supreme Court.