ICTA-UAB Best Prizes awarded to female postdoctoral researchers 

The award recognises works carried out by a postdoctoral researcher or with a central gender focus or feminist epistemology.

The two prizes, presented during the Welcome Event for new members of the ICTA-UAB community, recognised the Best Scientific Article and the Best Doctoral Thesis of 2022, both works carried out by a postdoctoral researcher or with a central gender focus or feminist epistemology. Two internal committees of researchers reviewed the applications and selected the winner for each category.  

Researcher Grettel Navas, who is currently a professor in the Faculty of Government at the University of Chile, was awarded for the Best Postdoctoral Published Paper published in 2022. The jury highlighted 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 in the Journal of Peasant Studies. 

The jury, composed of Jason Hickel, Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares and Gara Villalba, emphasises not only the quality of the well-written and meticulously documented work, but also its crystal-clear goals and the level of ethnographic attentiveness. It makes a clear, important and useful intervention, based on appropriate methodologies and with a very action-oriented dimension. 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. The jury believes 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 

Laura Simon Sánchez was the winner of the Best Doctoral Thesis Award 2022. Laura is currently a researcher at the Department of Built Environment at Aalborg University (BUILD-AAU), Denmark. 

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.  

The jury, consisting of Gerald Langer, Montserrat Roca and Angelos Varvarousis, considers that 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.