31

Dr Marina Korzenevica is awarded BNAC PhD Dissertation Prize 2018

London

The Britain Nepal Academic Council (BNAC)’s first PhD Dissertation Prize (2018) is awarded to Dr Marina Korzenevica’s paper ‘Young People Navigating Political Engagement through Post-war Instability and Mobility: A Case from Rural Nepal’. The paper was published in Geoforum 74 in 2016, and can be accessed through this link https://www.sciencedirect.com/s cience/article/pii/S001671851630149X.

A panel of judges from the BNAC comprising Prof. David Gellner, Dr Stefanie Lotter, and Dr Tejendra Pherali, awarded the prize to the paper and commented: “This was a well-contextualized and ethnographically rich study of young people in east Nepal and the ways in which they navigate the everyday politics of staying in the village or departing for work or study.”

This paper is derived from Marina’s PhD research, ‘Negotiating Life Chances: The Lives of Young People and Socio-Political Change in Rural Eastern Nepal’, completed at the University of Copenhagen.

The panel awarded second place to Samuele Poletti’s (University of Edinburgh) dissertation chapter, ‘Obscure Existential Narratives: Predetermination and Freedom in Nepalese Horoscopic Knowledge’. In joint third place were the article by Rashmi Upadhyay (North Eastern Hill University, India), ‘The Embodiment of “Fear” among Migrant Workers’ (in Q. Marak, ed., Doing Autoethnography, 2016, Delhi: Serials), and the dissertation chapter by Hanna Ruszczyk (Durham University), ‘Resilience Lens Ignores Risk Perception’.

There were altogether 18 high-quality submissions for the award. PhD students and recent graduates (within two years of graduation) from the social sciences or the humanities, registered in South Asian or European universities and conducting research about Nepal or the Nepali cultural world, were eligible to take part in the competition by submitting a chapter or paper from their PhD research.

The prize, worth £250, will be awarded at a function during the 16^th Nepal Study Days (Nepal Conference) on 16-17^th April 2018 in Durham.

The BNAC General Secretary Dr Krishna Adhikari said: “The BNAC has set up this prize to encourage and reward excellent research chapter/paper by a PhD student or recent PhD graduate. There are prizes available in America, and prizes exist for writing a Master’s thesis but there was no such prize for PhD students in Europe or South Asia researching Nepal. This year the response has been very encouraging. The BNAC will reflect upon this success and decide whether and how to continue in the coming year(s).”

05-04-2018