Winners 2022

2022 Best Postdoctoral Published Paper Prize by a female postdoctoral scientist or for a postdoc paper with a central gender focus or feminist epistemology.

Winner: Grettel Navas

 

Jury: Jason Hickel, Álvaro Fernández- Llamazares and Gara Villalba
 

We decided to award the prize to the article 'If there's no evidence, there's no victim': undone science and political organization in marginalising women as victims of DBCP in Nicaragua", published by Grettel Navas in the Journal of Peasant Studies.

We found that the article was not only well-written and meticulously documented, but also crystal-clear in its goals, and commendable in its level of ethnographic attentiveness. It makes a clear, important and useful intervention, drawing on appropriate methodologies and with a very action-oriented dimension. The author’s determination to amplify the voices of Nicaraguan women who became ill through the use of dibromochloropropane in banana plantations is laudable, and highly relevant to the scope and philosophy of the prize.

The Journal of Peasant Studies is an impressive outlet within the relevant field and publishing there is a good accomplishment in itself. We believe that the article captures well how the controversial situation of repairing the damage done by a pesticide has not integrated women’s perspectives or experiences of harm. It is a down-to-earth, easy-to-understand case study that will reach a large audience, as evidenced by the >440 reads accumulated as of today.

Deeply informed by extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in adverse sociopolitical conditions, Grettel Navas deftly managed to blend theoretical perspectives from political ecology, gender studies and ecotoxicology in unique and resourceful ways. We deeply admired her elegant and clean prose, and the poignant ways in which she illustrates how gendered biases in knowledge production result in failure to consider women's struggles in litigation processes.

Grettel Navas is currently a professor in the Faculty of Government at the University of Chile

 

2022 Best PhD Dissertation Prize for a female scientist or for a dissertation with a central gender focus or feminist epistemology.

Winner: Laura Simon Sánchez

Jury: Gerald Langer, Montserrat Roca and Angelos Varvarousis

The prize for best PhD for a female scientist or for a dissertation with a central gender focus or feminist epistemology goes to Laura Simon Sánchez. Her thesis entitled "Microplastic pollution in transitional environments. Methods, occurrence, and fate of microplastics in the Mediterranean Sea"  addresses a pressing environmental problem that has become one of the biggest challenges in protecting the world we live in. Besides plastic litter, visible to the naked eye, small, invisible, microplastics have been recognised as a threat to the health of many organisms including humans. The monitoring of microplastics, however, is lacking in rigour not least due to insufficient standardization. Laura analyses this problem in a clearly structured way

and provides urgently needed clarification and suggestions for improvement of methodology. Beyond this more technical first study, her thesis features a broad swathe of topics on microplastic research ranging from detailed local studies to large geographical surveys providing much needed data in critical systems. The selection of topics nicely spans the most important timely issues relating to plastic pollution and Laura always keeps the applicability to policy making in mind. Her thesis thus is relevant not only for specialists but also for a broader scientific community (including the social sciences) as well as for policy makers. The highly timely topic and rigorous approach of Laura’s thesis aside, she presents her work in a highly commendable way which makes it accessible to a diverse audience.

Laura Simon Sánchez is currently a researcher at the Department of Built Environment at Aalborg University (BUILD-AAU), Denmark.