Winner of IBP 2017 Dissertations Social Sciences

Gauri Bharat, 'Place-making Through Practice: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Santal Architectural History'.
Gauri Bharat's 'Place-making Through Practice' is an inter-disciplinary enquiry into the production, use and transformation of Santal built environments as both sites and processes. It advances an architectural history that is not about buildings alone, but which offers insights into people’s sense of their collective lives, and in particular their phenomenological engagements with the social, environmental and historical worlds that are in part defined by architecture. This all-round dissertation is the rightful winner of the IBP 2017 Dissertations Social Sciences prize.

Shortlist IBP 2017 Dissertations Social Sciences

Anna Romanowicz, 'The Activities of Feminist Non-governmental Organizations in Delhi. An Anthropological Case Study'.
Anna Romanowicz's 'The Activities of Feminist Non-governmental Organizations in Delhi' is a provocative study on the classic observer-participant model that offers a fundamental critique of its subject. It uses class analysis to demonstrate how an NGO dedicated to the empowerment of non-elite women actually reinforces cultural and class stereotypes while primarily benefitting the social and cultural capital of its middle-class employees and the interests of its multinational sponsors.

Ian Rowen, 'The Geopolitics of Tourism: Mobility, Territory, and Protest in Taiwan and China'.
Ian Rowan's 'The Geopolitics of Tourism' analyses tourism as a political practice serving ideological interests. Examining Chinese tourism and consequent recent events in Taiwan it argues that tourism should be viewed as a technology of state territorialisation; a mode of social and spatial ordering that produces tourists and state territory as effects of power.

Reading Committee Accolades IBP 2017 Dissertations Social Sciences

Most Accessible and Captivating Work for the Non-Specialist Reader Accolade
Susanne Asman, whose 'Bombay Going: Migration, Return and Anti-Trafficking in the Lives of Nepali Migrant Sex Workers', offers a compelling analysis of actors and agents in the sub-continental sex-trade in modern India.

Ground-Breaking Subject Matter Accolade
Tani Sebro, whose 'Dancing the Nation: The Politics of Exile, Mobility and Displacement Along the Thai-Burma Border' argues that nations are maintained primarily through the complex transmission of ‘aesthetic nationalisms’, which involve embodied performances and cultural practices that constitute the body-politic.

Specialist Dissertation Accolade
Peng Liu, whose 'Body in the Forbidden City' is an innovative artistic project examining the interrelationship between the author's Chinese/Confucian body and Beijing, itself inscribed with Confucian values and cultural meanings.