The panel of the 2022 PolGRG Undergraduate Disseration Prize (Cordelia Freeman, Dato Gogishvili and Jonathan Harris) is delighted to announce its winning entry.

The prize received entries from 13 UK universities (Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Durham, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Northumbria, Nottingham Trent, Nottingham, Oxford, Southampton, UCL). The studies ranged in their regional focus beyond the UK, from China to colonial Sudan, and were reflective of the variety of approaches within the subdiscipline, focusing on law, popular culture, social inequality and poverty reduction, urbanism and many other themes. As the research for these dissertations would have started in 2021, many students demonstrated significant adaptability and innovation in responding to restrictions related to Covid-19.

The Winner:

To Make Live Yet Let Die: Biopolitics on the Practices of Targeted Poverty Alleviation in China

By Baichuan Liu (Oxford University)

This ambitious piece brings together theoretical rigour and substantive fieldwork in a challenging context to give an impressive account of the biopolitics of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation scheme in rural China. Liu demonstrates a firm grasp of complex theoretical ideas relating to Foucauldian affirmative biopolitics and Agamben’s thanatopolitics, as well as effectively bringing Chinese scholarship into their discussion. Using effective interviews and field observation of poverty alleviation policies in two Chinese villages, Liu focuses on land transfer policies, ecological construction and labour resettlement to tease out three features that “manifest and reconceptualise” the existing scholarship on biopolitics and biopower. Overall, the panel was very impressed by the conception and execution of this outstanding piece.

Highly Commended (listed alphabetically):

A critical evaluation of the potential implications of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill upon the political capacity to protest for young people and its impact on democracy

Alice Robertson (Nottingham Trent University)

This dissertation is commended for its timely contribution to debates about protest, democracy and youth politics. Robertson connects geographical literature with political science debates particularly well.

A ‘postcolonial-borderlands approach’ to the Northern Province of colonial Sudan, 1897-1956

Thomas Bartlett (Durham University)

This dissertation is commended for its intellectual ambition and methodological innovation. It is well-written and engages creatively with the geographical literature, seeking to make a theoretical intervention in the field of political geography specifically around the idea of a ‘postcolonial-borderlands approach’.

America: Irredeemable and Redeemable? Exploring Representations of America in the Guantanamo Genre

Christiane McGuire (Newcastle University)

This dissertation, which analyses two Hollywood films about Guantanamo Bay, is very well located in relation to existing literature and scholarship on popular geopolitics. The methodology and analytical approach are explained and executed particularly well.

A huge congratulations to these students!