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We are able to report the exceptionally good news that Lauren Tooker, a former PAIS PhD student and now an IAS Early Career Fellow, has been awarded the ECPR Jean Blondel Prize for Best PhD. This is a Europe-wide PhD prize, and huge congratulations must go to Lauren on such a tremendous achievement.

The news is now live on the , including the commendations of the prize jury. Lauren’s thesis was entitled, ‘Ordinary Democracy: Reading Resistance to Debt after the Global Financial Crisis with Stanley Cavell’s Ordinary Language Philosophy’.

Using a theoretical approach rooted in Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy, Lauren’s thesis shows how ordinary democratic subjects are opposing debt-based economic citizenship in the UK and the US. The study's central argument is that debt’s ordinary democrats are reconstructing debt relations as a site of democratic selfhood and community in finance, thus representing important practices of civic freedom.

Lauren was a GEM School PhD student funded through our Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Programme. She was supervised through her degree at ¹û¶³´«Ã½ by Lena Rethel, James Brassett and Matthew Watson, and at the Université Libre de Bruxelles by Firouzeh Nahavandi. She was examined by Paul Langley (Durham), Amandine Crespy (ULB) and Mike Saward (¹û¶³´«Ã½).