Below you can find the winners of our Dissertation Prize awards since 2010, and links to their respective dissertations. Please use these research projects as examples of good practice when writing up a dissertation or other academic article.

The winner receives £100 for the best Undergraduate dissertation while the runner-up and winner both receive a year’s personal subscription to the journal Social and Cultural Geography, published by Taylor & Francis.

2023

Winner: Sara Flower, University of Manchester

Mind the Gap: A more than representational analysis of lineside green space in Hadley Wood: https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:a02920bd-44ef-3e02-a525-577005d741d4

Runner-up: Steven Farquhar, Queens University Belfast

The Future of Biodiversity Conservation: Synthesising Anarchism and More-Than-Human Theory in the Edgelands of Belfast

2022

Winner: Roisín Gilloch Boyle, University of Edinburgh

Memories, Absences and Affects: Art and Geography in Dialogue with Narbi Price’s Ashington Paintings

Runner-up: Lukas Lyko, University of Oxford

“I don’t have the luxury of being able to do nothing”: Exploring Temporalities and Navigations of Everyday Mobility Through the Experiences of People with Multiple Sclerosis

2020

Winner: Eleanor Pendle, Oxford University

The Poblenou Superblock: Rights, Responsibilities and Exclusions

Runner Up: Bethan Jones, University of Edinburgh

Walking Utopia: How is Harlow New Town remembered through public sculpture walks? A case for transcorporeal geographies of memory

2019

Winner: Charles Couve, University of Manchester

More-than-human Manchester: Recombinance, Auras, and Dialectics in the Edges of Modernity

Runner Up: William Silver, Durham University

Gordon Matta-Clark’s slices through space: artwork towards a critical understanding of the spatial

2018

Winner: Zainab Ravat, Queen Mary University of London

Photojournalism: Explorations into the Geographical Witness, Activist and Traveller

Runner Up: Kieran Green, University of Plymouth

In the Balance: Unsettled Space and Sofa-surfing

2017

Winner: Anna Knowles-Smith, University College London

Refugees and theatre: an exploration of the basis of self-representation

Runner Up: Thomas Paulsen, University of Exeter

In Search of Danish Atmospheres

2016

Winner: Imogen Fox, University of Brighton

Meltdowns in the mud: A spatial, emotional and relational approach to the experience of ‘care’ in the micro-spatialities of Glastonbury Festival

Runner-up: Megan O’Kane, Queens University Belfast

Geographies of Suicide and the Representation of Self-Sacrifice in Japanese Popular Culture and Media

2015

Winner: Emma-Mai Eshelby, University of Leicester

Gown and town: the unfolding presence of studentification in Clarendon Park, Leicester

Runner-up: Grace Burchell, University of Nottingham

Breeding Frankenstein’s Bulldog: reimagining the Pedigree in Nineteenth Century England

Runner-up: Amelia Davy, Oxford University

Temporal worldings: an exploration of how time was implicated in the experiences of American Soldiers during the Vietnam War

We decided to have two runners-up this year, due to the high standard of entries.

2014

Winner: Jennifer Durrant, University of Cambridge

Fallen on hard times: Re-examining the homeless hostel

Runner-up: Helen Spooner, University of Oxford

A kinaesthetic spirituality: An autophenomenographic account of running 250km of the Camino Portugués

2013

Winner: Helen Trimm, University of Nottingham

Reconstructing home as a site of care: an exploration into the changing meaning of home for elderly women

Runner-up: Simon Cook, University of Plymouth 

Jography: Exploring the Mobilities of Road-Running

2012

Winner: Chris Goodman, University of Oxford 

Walking with Lions: reconfiguring ‘wild(er)ness’, ‘domestication’ and ‘captivity’ through ALERT’s lion rewilding project

Runner up: Nicholas Speechley, Loughborough University

‘Keeping them together’, University Accommodation and the ‘International’ Student: A Case Study of Loughborough University, UK 

2011

Winner: Jessica Potts, Durham University

“We are not here, we are not there”: Young Refugees’ and Asylum Seeker’s Negotiations of Identity and Belonging

Runner up: Mary McLaren, University of Exeter 

Constructing distant geographies of care: the example of Fairtrade in Horsham

2010

Winner: Kaleigh Jones, University of Oxford,

Embodying Mobile Cultures: a case study of Capoeira

Runner up: Emma Bonny, University of Nottingham

The landscape and culture of allotments: a study in Hornchurch, Essex