After careful review of many great submissions, we are pleased to announce the winners of the 2014 AfAA Graduate and Undergraduate Paper Awards.
The winner of this year’s Bennetta Jules-Rosette Graduate Essay Award is Uwa Oduwa of Georgetown University. Uwa’s master’s thesis, “Rethinking Study Abroad: Academic Exchange in Developing Nations and the Case for Nigeria,” is an insightful examination of study-abroad programs and their assessment by educational professionals. The thesis focuses on programs hosted in Nigeria and draws upon a wide range of scholarship: from Africanist and diasporic studies to network theory, cosmopolitanism, and education research. Uwa synthesized survey data with a contextual study of Nigerian higher education to conclude that raising the prominence of Africa-based faculty also increases student and educational exchanges. The study offers great promise for expanding the role of African centers of higher education within academic and global networks.
The winner of this year’s Nancy “Penny” Schwartz Undergraduate Essay Award is Alexis Coopersmith of the University of California, San Diego, for her honors thesis “Pathways to Power: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Wangari Maathai, and the African Woman’s Pursuit of Political Power.” Alexis’ thesis is an impressive work of anthropological, sociological, and political analysis. She develops an innovative grounded-theory approach for the study of women’s political power and methodically applies her theory to the life stories of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Wangari Maathai. The thesis offers new models of social change applicable to Africanist anthropology, feminist and gender studies, political sociology, and beyond. The strength of the thesis resulted in Alexis being offered an internship with a UN task force. She is currently working with a the UN in Malawi, collecting ethnographic data, and putting her theories to practice. Alexis’s thesis also won awards from the African and African American Studies Research Center (AAASRC) and the Department of Sociology at UCSD.
Sarah Rayzl Lansky of Macalester College is the recipient of this year’s undergraduate paper honorable mention for her paper ” My Brother Before Me: The Role and Experience of Local Humanitarian Aid Workers In Eastern Cameroon.” Sarah Lansky’s piece contains a strong and extensive fieldwork component, including interviews and participant observation of humanitarian workers in Cameroon. The thesis shines an ethnographic lens upon humanitarian work, and the ways in which aid workers shape global flows, international relations, refugee cultures, and migration. Sarah also explores how local agents of humanitarian organizations contribute to building the African middle class.
Congratulations to all our awardees on their great work!
