We are pleased to finally announce the winner of the Political Geography Research Group (PolGRG) Book Award. We received a collection of strong nominations for this year’s book award, which engage with a range of current debates across political geography and advance key conceptional thinking therein. The collection of nominations illustrates the high quality of scholarship currently taking place within the field. 

After careful consideration, we are delighted to announce that the winner is Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India by Rupal Oza.  

In the words of the panel: 

“With this book, Rupal Oza provides timely and novel analysis of the political geographies of rape. The book offers a very rich account of the work that rape cases do across different sites and scales – from the body, the family, the village, to caste politics. Empirically, the book focuses on the state of Haryana in India and traces the ways that rape cases are resolved and settled within and beyond the formal remit of the India’s official judicial system through various means. Oza documents how rape cases are rarely “just” a sexual violation but are instead tied to other sites, political questions, and broader social structures, albeit in unexpected ways. Drawing on a range of feminist and Black studies theoretical insights, Oza moves discussions of about sovereignty, autonomy, and sexual subjectivities forward and beyond the frame of resistance. The book points us toward new directions in terms of imagining justice beyond current legal systems and formal conceptions of justice”.    

We would like to thank all those who made nominations and congratulations to Rupal Oza who will receive an award from PolGRG sponsored by the journal Political Geography (published by Elsevier) of £100, and an opportunity to hold an Author meets Critics session at the annual RGS-IBG meeting in 2025, leading to a book award review forum published in Political Geography. 

The panel also identified Christopher A. Loperena’s book The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras and Andrew Baldwin’s book The Other of Climate Change: Racial Futurism, Migration, Humanism as worthy of a Highly Commended award.