Update: the closing date for nominations has been extended to Friday May 21st, 2021.
The International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) invites nominations for the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize. The prize is awarded annually for a book that constitutes, motivates or exemplifies the best and/or most innovative new writing in or about the tradition of critical realism. Nominations for books published in 2020 should be made to The Prize Panel Chair, Dave Elder-Vass:
d.elder-vass@lboro.ac.uk
The closing date for nominations is April 30th, 2021 May 21st, 2021. The winner will be declared at the IACR Annual Conference in September.
The winner will be invited to give the annual Cheryl Frank Memorial Lecture at the IACR Annual Conference in 2022, or some other suitable venue. If the author wishes, the lecture will be considered for publication in Journal of Critical Realism.
The Cheryl Frank Committee currently consists of Dave Elder-Vass (Chair), Monica Kjørstad and Ross Morrow. Past recipients include Tony Lawson, Graham Scambler, Christian Smith, Alan Norrie, Ruth Groff, Nick Hostettler, Margaret Archer and Pierpaolo Donati, Chris Sarra, Matthew L. N. Wilkinson, Lena Gunnarsson, Leigh Price & Heila Lotz-Sisitka, Doug Porpora, and the late Roy Bhaskar (ed. Merwyn Hartwig).
Cheryl Lynn Frank (1946-2010) was an American scholar and activist. Born on August 1, 1946 in Illinois, she married and had two children; was active in the civil rights movement, participating in Martin Luther King’s march in Selma, Alabama and later established the first domestic violence shelter in the USA (in Champaign, Illinois); she worked as a policy analyst at the state level, as a journalist, editor and freelance writer. She took masters’ degrees in politics and journalism, did extensive research on the position of women and native Americans in the twentieth century and completed extensive doctoral work in cultural studies and mass communication. She became however increasingly dissatisfied with the dominant positivist and poststructuralist methodologies, and at the same time increasingly interested in spiritual issues.
In November 2002 she met Roy Bhaskar at a meeting of the Foundation of Light (of which she was President) in Ithaca, New York. They corresponded and she joined him in London in February 2003. From then on, she was his lover, partner and inseparable companion, and became utterly devoted to his well-being and to the cause of critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality, throwing herself into this work. She died after a short illness on January 22, 2010, leaving, besides Roy, her two children and three grandchildren. Her only published work in critical realism is an essay in Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change (which she co-edited with Roy and others); but she made a huge contribution, assisting Roy in his work, and to the movement and to her many friends within it. The collection of essays, Critical Realism and Spirituality, edited by Mervyn Hartwig and Jamie Morgan, is dedicated to her memory.
Douglas Porpora, Ph.D., President of IACR
Professor of Sociology
Department of Communication
Drexel University
3141 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia PA 19104
porporad@drexel.edu