WASS Publication Awards

On October 21, we had a small personal and an online meeting to hand out the WASS Publication Awards 2020. The money of the two awards have been made available by the previous Director of the Social Sciences Group, Laan van Staalduinen.

Winner WASS Publication Award 2020

Michiel de Haas from the chair group Rural and Environmental History with the paper entitled ‘Moving Beyond Colonial Control? Economic Forces and Shifting Migration from Ruanda-Urundi to Buganda, 1920-1960’. The paper was published in Journal of African History

Jury:

The paper was published in a leading journal within the specific history domain. It is well written and accessible to and understandable for readers from different disciplinary backgrounds (both committee members understood and appreciated it). The paper also stands out for its interdisciplinary nature by linking African history, to economic history and migration studies and thereby advancing all three areas. The Innovativeness of the paper comes in two ways. First by its focus on an era (1850 – 2000) and second by the choice of the topic (which is mass migration within Africa) that is often less researched in the field of African mobility/migration studies.

Winner of the Best Young Researcher WASS Publication award 2020

Angela Moriggi from the chair group Rural Sociology with her paper entitled ‘Exploring enabling resources for place-based social entrepreneurship: a participatory study of Green Care practices in Finland’ The paper was published in Sustainability Science.

Jury:

The author uses an innovative methodology and contributes to the development of a new conceptual framework for the transformative capacity of place‑shaping practices. The author explores the array of resources that enable and constrain the development of Green Care practice, i.e., nature-based activities with a social innovation purpose. The paper can be considered to be an important contribution to the mission of WASS ‘To explore societal processes to improve the quality of life’ under the Theme “Knowledge in Society”. The committee also emphasizes that this is a single authored paper in a journal with a high impact factor. The paper has already been cited six times.