1st Place Winner

Jordan Thomas

University of California, Santa Barbara

I am a socio-cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara researching the intersections of people, environments, and wildfires in California. I am particularly interested in tracking the history and culture of fire suppression to better understand unprecedented socio-environmental shifts. My imminent doctoral research will use multi-sited, multi-scalar methods to document how wildfire knowledge is created, predictions formed, and uncertainties managed in contexts of increasing environmental instability.

2nd Place Winner

Dalton Price

University of Oxford

Dalton Price is a DPhil candidate in anthropology at the University of Oxford. Based in La Guajira, a Colombian state bordering Venezuela, his doctoral research focuses broadly on the experiences of Venezuelan migrants in these borderlands. Dalton’s previous research looked at global health bureaucracies like the World Health Organization, and his Peter K. New paper builds on his time working as a contact tracer at the Florida Department of Health. He has published in Medicine Anthropology Theory, HuffPost, Common Dreams, Global Health NOW, and the Daytona Beach News-Journal and contributed to pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Humanitarian, and ABC Action News.

3rd Place Winner

Zihao Lin

University of Chicago

Zihao Lin is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. He is interested in anthropological inquiries of urban life, access, and design, and extends them to engage with questions of disability citizenship in contemporary China. Following state officials, tech entrepreneurs, and disability rights activists, he explores the ethical and material transformations brought by the concepts of “barrier-free” and “access” and related objects (i.e., screen readers, remote sign language interpreting, or voice recognition applications), investigates what visions are enacted by the state and market when such concepts are claimed and articulated, and how a pan-Chinese network of disability activists negotiate meanings of “barrier-free city” in generative ways. He is also an editor of TyingKnots (结绳志), an open-access anthropology platform run by young academics dedicated to spreading progressive scholarship to Chinese readers.