The AAS Executive Committee is pleased to announce the 2019 prize winners for the best PhD and Honours/Masters theses, and the best article published in an Australian journal. The following winners were officially announced during the 2019 AAS Conference in Canberra - a huge congratulations to all!
The 2019 PhD Thesis Prize was awarded to:
Dr Sophie Chao, of Macquarie University, for her dissertation, 'In the Shadow of the Palms: Plant-Human Relations Among Marind-Anim, West Papua'.
Dr Chao completed her thesis under the supervision of Dr Jaap Timmer (Macquarie University), Dr Eve Vincent (Macquarie University), and Dr Eben Kirksey (Deakin University). The thesis examines how deforestation and oil palm expansion reconfigure the multispecies lifeworld of indigenous Marind communities in the Indonesian-controlled region of West Papua. It situates these transformations within ongoing processes of extractive colonization and racial discrimination in West Papua – a region whose native inhabitants continue to be denied the right to political and cultural self-determination. Rooted in indigenous theory and practice, the thesis offers a theoretically nuanced and ethnographically rich analysis of the lives, struggles, and resilience of West Papuan communities in the face of entrenched regimes of color and capital. For more information about Sophie's research, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.
The 2019 Honours/Masters Thesis Prize was awarded to:
Daniel Alexander Tranter, of Macquarie University, for his dissertation, ‘I Spoke to Her in My Mind, Not With My Lips’: Pregnancy, Nausea, and Fetal Personhood in Manila City, the Philippines'.
Daniel completed his thesis under the supervision of Associate Professor Kalpana Ram (Macquarie University). The thesis is on unmarried women’s experiences of early pregnancy. It is located among families who live in a very poor part of Manila, and is situated also by the illegality of abortion and the moral shame attached to pregnancy outside marriage by both family and Church. The thesis makes a significant contribution to the phenomenology of pregnancy with its rich, detailed and sensitive explorations of the different shifts and phases in women’s experiences of their changing bodies and their developing relationship with the unborn child, and it is particularly acute in treating female experience of pregnancy in the context of patriarchal power relations. Examiners have commented especially on the thesis as ‘compelling reading’ with its beautifully crafted writing and capacity to integrate his ethnographic material with wider theories of phenomenology as well as the anthropology of personhood.
The 2019 Article Prize was awarded to:
Dr Jason Roberts, of the University of Texas at San Antonio, for his Oceania article, '"We Live Like This": Local Inequalities and Disproportionate Risk in the Context of Extractive Development and Climate Change on New Hanover Island, Papua New Guinea'.
This study examines the local processes, effects, and responses to large-scale logging and agricultural development efforts in subsistence communities on New Hanover Island, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Recently, New Hanover became the site of three special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover approximately 79% of the island. The proliferation of SABLs within PNG is an outcome of recent national development initiatives promoting a significant increase in the production of commercial agricultural crops such as oil palm and biofuel. Accordingly, SABLs are designed to facilitate the development of long-term commercial agricultural industries in rural locations across the country through the conversion of forested lands and the simplification of communal land tenure, for the purposes of private lease. However, SABLs have simultaneously provided a convenient loophole around more restrictive national forestry policies and thereby become attractive to traditional logging interests in the Asian/Pacific region. Consequently, many SABLs across PNG have failed to produce viable agricultural development or broad local benefit. It is within this context, that this study pays particular attention to the experiences of women and lower-status landowners living through the processes of SABL conversion, during the El Nino drought of 2015. The study details the statuses and roles of these groups within the overall development process, the ways in which their social relationships changed in the context of development, why these groups were particularly vulnerable to the broad livelihood effects of forest conversion and drought, how they adapted to these effects, and what their hopes were regarding the future of the development project and life on the island. This study adds to current theoretical interests on emerging neoliberal frontiers of land and resource control by examining these SABL landscapes on New Hanover as contemporary examples of land grabs and documenting the very real local level consequences of this phenomenon. The study is also particularly significant in light of the growing threats to forests and forest-dependent livelihoods and the recognition of the importance of local forest practices to global sustainability.