Charlène Calderaro wins our 2025 Joni Lovenduski PhD prize

We're excited to announce that Charlène Calderaro has been awarded the 2025 Joni Lovenduski PhD Prize in Gender and Politics for her richly reflexive dissertation, Far-Righting Feminism: Criminalising Street Harassment in France and Britain.

The Joni Lovenduski PhD Prize in Gender and Politics is awarded biennially for an outstanding PhD dissertation in the field of gender and politics, including gender and/or sexuality studies perspectives in political science, international relations, political philosophy, public policy and public administration. The prize is awarded jointly with our Standing Group on Gender and Politics.

The winning dissertation offers an original empirical contribution to the study of intersectionality in practice, and to the understanding of the complex and often troubling entaglements between feminism and the far right.

Our winner

Charlène Calderaro is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne, specialising in feminism and far-right politics. Her work explores how feminist causes are appropriated by reactionary actors in Europe, connecting research on state feminism and public policy, feminist movements, and the gender politics of the far right.

For her PhD thesis, she analysed the criminalisation of street harassment in France and the UK, showing how feminist claims against gender-based violence were reframed and diluted by a range of political actors, and ultimately redirected towards exclusionary ends. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with feminists, policymakers, and far-right activists, her research traced the mechanisms through which a cause initially championed by feminists was gradually appropriated by the far right in the French context.

In her own words

I feel immensely honoured to receive the Joni Lovenduski Prize, especially from a community of scholars that has so deeply shaped my journey. This recognition carries special weight, as it acknowledges years of research, dialogue and collaboration, but also, at times, difficult encounters with reactionary movements. It is a precious encouragement to continue exploring the tensions surrounding feminist politics in today’s climate of a rising far right.

Her recent publication in Politics and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2025) explores how a women-only far-right collective, which presents itself as 'identitarian feminist', appropriates feminism through the fight for women’s safety in France. Her work is also featured in Policy and Politics (Bristol University Press, 2023), the European Journal of Women’s Studies, and the Anti-Trafficking Review.

Charlène also engages with broader audiences, including through media appearances on France Info and Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS), and in podcasts such as the Culture & Inequality series, for an episode on Gender as Battlefield: Far-Right Movements, Femonationalism and Replacement Ideology.

Jury members

• Petra Guasti, Charles University (Chair, non-voting)
• Niels Spierings, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
• Shardia Briscoe-Palmer, University of Nottingham
• Ayşe Dursun, University of Vienna
• Ashlee Christofferson, York University
• Éva Fodor, Central European University

Keywords: Europe (Central and Eastern), Gender, Feminism, Power, Activism