2011 SCGRG Undergraduate Dissertation Prize Winners

We are delighted to announce the award winners for the 2011 Undergraduate Dissertation Prize.

Jessica Potts, University of Durham, is the winner for her dissertation entitled “We are not here, we are not there”: Young Refugees’ and Asylum Seeker’s Negotiations of Identity and Belonging’. The committee praised the study for its high level of theoretical engagement, its excellent empirical analysis and its methodological innovation. The committee felt it made a significant and original contribution to academic debates on identity and belonging in social and cultural geography.

Mary McLaren, University of Exeter, was highly commended for her dissertation entitled ‘Constructing distant geographies of care: the example of Fairtrade in Horsham’. The Committee thought it was an impressive and sophisticated study, written in an eloquent and clear style, engaging with challenging issues and debates. It deftly weaved existing literature with original research findings. The findings were based on high quality, in-depth multi-method qualitative research. The Committee felt that the research was both engaging and innovative and nicely developed ideas within the existing cultural geography literature on fair trade.

The SCGRG recieved around 16 high quality nominations for this prize from depaments across the country.  We would like to thank everyone for sharing their work with us.  We saw many examples of very high quality  research that indicates the relevance of social and cultural geography to the study of contemporary issues and concerns.  We were pleased to see the range of work across different universities and would like to congratulate everyone who was nominated by their departments for this excellent achievement.

Gail Davies (Chair) & Emma Roe (Dissertation Convenor)