APSA Spotlight Scholar: Mazie Bernard
Purdue Political Science graduate student Mazie Bernard was selected by APSA’s Interpretive Methodologies and Methods (IMM) group as an IMM Spotlight Scholar for the 2025-2026 academic year. The Spotlight Scholars program aims to highlight three outstanding early-career scholars each year whose work showcases or advances interpretive approaches to the study of politics.
During their tenure, each Spotlight Scholar is paired with a more senior interpretivist scholar who will provide mentorship. APSA pairs early career scholars with senior scholars who share similar substantive or methodological interests and provides a platform to showcase excellent research from early career scholars. Spotlight Scholars participate in an online event organized in the Spring by IMM where they receive feedback from other members of the interpretive methods community.
Ms. Bernard's dissertation, Ideas and Expertise in Global Economic Governance: Gendered Knowledge Creation, Integration, and Contestation, looks at how new economic ideas are created, integrated, and changed in global economic governance. She conceptualize three forms of ideational conflict and change – emergence, adaptation, and rejection – among international organizations (IOs) and the role of expert staff in the institutionalization of gendered economic ideas. Ms. Bernard focuses specifically on gender experts, who wield significant power and authority in global governance and policymaking. Despite recent scholarship on epistemic practices associated with gender experts, this literature has only recently shifted toward explaining the variation in when, why, and what types of gendered ideas are embedded within global economic governance (Gerard 2023; Scott and Olivius 2023; Weaver 2010).
Her theoretical intervention synthesizes insights from research on ideas and expertise in global governance, the epistemic power of IOs, and feminist IPE to explain how different types of ideas about gender and economic development are produced and become influential in global policymaking.