Nominations are now open for the 2023 Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize. Nominations should be made to the IACR General Secretary, Catherine Hastings, catherine.hastings@mq.edu.au by 31 May, 2023.
The Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize is awarded annually for a book that constitutes, motivates or exemplifies the best and/or most innovative writing in or about the tradition of critical realism. Nominees for this year’s prize must have been published in 2022. The winner is invited to give the annual Cheryl Frank Memorial Lecture at the 2024 IACR Annual Conference or some other suitable venue. If the Author wishes, the lecture will be considered for publication in Journal of Critical Realism.
This year’s Cheryl Frank Award Committee are Karin Zotzmann (Chair), Urs Linder and Kevin Schilbrack.
** Priscilla Alderson, winner of the 2022 Cheryl Frank Prize, will make a presentation of her book Critical Realism for Health and Illness Research: A Practical Introduction at this year’s IACR Conference in August **
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 master 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.