1st Place Winner

Yen Le

Australian National University

An Incomplete Cure: The Limits of Medical Normalization

The first prize in the annual Peter Kong-ming New Student Research Award was presented to Ms. Yen Le, a doctoral student at the Australian National University.  Ms. Le won the Award with her paper, “An incomplete cure: The limits of medical normalization.”

Ms. Le grew up in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Japan at the Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University where she completed the B.A. and M.A. degrees.   This also allowed her the opportunity to learn another language (Japanese) along with Vietnamese and English.  Following the M.A. degree, she was awarded a scholarship to enter the highly respected doctoral program in the Department of Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU).  There she was able to work with Dr. Philip Taylor, one of the top Asian scholars in the world.  She has completed her dissertation and was awarded the Ph.D. degree in Anthropology.

Yen’s decision to focus her research on the leprosy village of Quy Hoa was quite serendipitous.  She was traveling in 2009 with a group of friends who were lecturers at the Vietnam National University.  The group visited orphanages, rehab centers, and the leprosy village, distributing charity gifts to the residents.

This was her first exposure to the community and to the idea that leprosy patients live in an isolated and homogeneous world.   She was intrigued at the time and her interest increased as she progressed with her graduate education.  As a doctoral student at ANU and under Dr. Taylor’s guidance, she was able to develop that initial interest into a PhD research project.  The paper that she submitted to the P. K. New Competition was drawn from that research.

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in communities for leprosy-affected people, Yen’s PhD dissertation journeys into the world of people with leprosy in Vietnam. Relating the stories of the Vietnamese who live with this disease it offers an ethnographic rendering of their experiences of affliction and of care. Attentive to the cultural meanings of leprosy, the research guides the reader through the heterogeneous epistemic grounds that constitute this disease in Vietnam, investigating folk aetiologies, religious and state ideologies, scientific and public health discourses, and the performative displays of entitlement and abjection deployed by those with leprosy.

Yen has also previously lectured at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City. She is very interested in anthropology and public health and plans to pursue those areas in the near future.

2nd Place Winner

Elena S. Becker

University of Puget Sound

Malagasy Cookstove Use and the Potential for Alternative Models: A Case Study in Madagascar’s Vakinankaratra region

Elena Becker is an undergraduate at the University of Puget Sound, where she is obtaining a degree in Sociology and Anthropology. She is interested in social change and development, and has conducted independent ethnographic research on generational change in durable intentional communities, on cultural authenticity and the impacts of cultural tourism in Malaysian Borneo, and on the effects of wood-fuel burning cookstoves in rural Madagascar. The latter forms the content of her Peter K. New paper, which outlines the cultural and material characteristics that make these traditional stoves popular, and how those attributes can be applied to alternative stoves to increase their adoption and retention. She will receive her Bachelor of Arts in May 2017.

3rd Place Winner

Lina Stepick

University of California – Los Angeles

You lose something, you know?” Environmental Gentrification, Displacement, andPerceptions of Neighborhood Instability around Light-Rail Public Transit

Lina Stepick is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to graduate school she worked as a community organizer in the East L.A. neighborhood of Boyle Heights on issues of gentrification, displacement, and environmental justice. Her current research focuses on the politics of the urban growth machine and social equity organizing efforts around the current $9 billion investment in L.A. public transit, as well as the impacts of this investment on gentrification and displacement in historically disinvested neighborhoods.

Honorable Mention

Jennifer Zwillenberg

University of Pennsylvania

School And Self: The Alignment and Misalignment of Literacy Practices