We are pleased to announce this year’s winners of Political Geography Specialty Group awards. Typically these announcements are made at the annual PGSG business meeting, which we unfortunately were not be able to hold this year. Congratulations to all of our winners
Student Awards
Political Geography Undergraduate Student Paper Award
Sara Kaminski James Madison University “A Historical and Cartographic Association between the British Colonization of Burma and the Rohingya Crisis in the Modern Day Myanmar”
Graduate Student Paper Award Winners
Hilary Faxon, Cornell University “Performing Property After Authoritarian Rule”
Jonghee Lee-Caldararo, University of Kentucky “Micropolitics of sleepless in Seoul: Understanding South Korean young adults’ nighttime practices at 24-hour-cafés through Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality”
Alexander Murphy Dissertation Enhancement Award
Jenny McGibbon Ohio State The Anti-trafficking Movement and the Impact of SESTA/FOSTA on the U.S. Sex Industry.
Non Student Awards
Stanley Brunn Young Scholar Award
Andrew Curley University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
From the nomination letter:
Andrew, though a junior scholar, is a leader in the theorization of environmental questions through the lens of Indigenous sovereignty, and I expect him to have an outsized impact on the discipline through contributions to Indigenous geographies, development geographies, and resource geographies. Sovereignty and territory are at the heart of political geography, and yet little of our work has really grappled with what sovereignty means to Indigenous scholars. This is a tremendous weakness, and one that Andrew has taken up with insight, empirical work, and compelling theoretical arguments.
Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award
Lindsay Naylor, University of Delaware, Fair Trade Rebels Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
From the Nomination Letter:
This book provides an empirically grounded analysis of the diverse economic and agricultural practices of indigenous coffee producers in resistance as they play out in self-declared autonomous communities in highland Chiapas; such practices are enacted as a struggle for dignified livelihoods. Fair Trade Rebels draws on stories and experiences coming from the highlands based in interaction with the fair trade certified marketplace and state violence. In five substantive chapters, this book covers the racialized and historical underpinnings of coffee production and rebel autonomy in the highlands of Chiapas, deconstructs development and common binaries associated with fair trade certification, considers the possibilities of being in common, and evaluates actually existing food sovereignty and diverse economic exchanges.
The University of Minnesota Press has made the first chapter of this book available. It can be found here: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/fair-trade-rebels
Virginie Mamadouh Outstanding Research Award
Kate Coddington University at Albany, State University of New York
The slow violence of life without cash: borders, state restrictions, and exclusion in the U.K. and Australia. Geographical Review. 109 (4): 527-543.
The Geographical Review has generously opened access to this article in celebration of this award. It can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1111/gere.12332
Richard Morrill Public Outreach Award
Austin Kocher, Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University
From the nomination letter
Dr. Austin Kocher is currently a faculty fellow at the Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. He graduated from the Ohio State University in 2017 with a PhD in Geography. Trained as a legal and political geographer, his research focuses on the intersection of law, space, and immigration. While attending the Ohio State, Austin co-founded the Central Ohio Worker Center (COWC), an NGO which advocates with and for workers and immigrants in Central Ohio, combating wage theft, defending immigrants at risk of deportation, and educating workers to the benefits of collective action. Austin worked with the COWC for five years, and in his own words “We created the COWC to fill the heartbreaking lack of advocacy and organizing with undocumented immigrants and un-unionized workers living in Columbus. As a team, we worked hard to stop deportations, return stolen wages to workers, and build a viable organization.” […] Austin’s current work at TRAC is published in numerous major news outlets (such as the WSJ, NYT, the Hill, and CBS News), educating the public on the reality of immigration patterns, the asylum process, and deportation. In addition to a robust scholarly publication record, Austin frequently publishes articles and op-eds for non-academic outlets on a number of topics, from immigration to non-violence in the era of Trump.