Kaleigh Jones, University of Oxford, is our 2010 winner for her dissertation entitled Embodying Mobile Cultures: a case study of Capoeira. The committee praised the design of the study for its considerable flair and sophistication, and the insightful, innovative and evocative write-up. The study was an extremely theoretically engaged study, based upon fieldwork in the UK and Brazil and gave a rich empirical analysis. The committee felt it made a genuine contribution to academic geography in social and cultural geography.
Emma Bonny, University of Nottingham, was highly commended for her dissertation entitled The landscape and culture of allotments: a study in Hornchurch, Essex. The committee were impressed with how deftly she weaved existing literature with original research findings. The findings were based on high quality, in-depth multi-method qualitative research. The discussion of the research was both engaging, innovative and developed ideas within existing cultural geography literature on allotments.
The winner has received £100 and the runner-up £50. Both have also been given a one-year free subscription to the journal Social and Cultural Geography courtesy of Taylor & Francis. In total we received 18 submissions for the prize. These spanned the breadth of social and cultural geography interests and we look forward to continuing with the prize in 2011.
Emma Roe & Gail Davies