27
June
2018
|
09:27
Europe/London

Royal Anthropological Institute awards for Manchester academics

The Royal Anthropological Institute has awarded Social Anthropology lecturer Dr. Madeleine Reeves its prestigious Rivers Memorial Medal, to recognise her excellence in fieldwork and publications.

Madeleine is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences. She has been recognised for her contributions to the study of border regimes and migration in post-Soviet countries, which focuses on the everyday workings of international borders in contexts of dramatic state transformation (particularly in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) and migration and social transformation between Central Asia and Russia.

Her monograph, Border Work: Social Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia, published in 2014, has won 4 awards, including the 'Past Presidents' Gold Book Award' from the Association of Borderland Studies.

The Rivers medal was established in 1923, and is awarded annually to mark a recent body of work making ‘a significant contribution to social, physical or cultural anthropology or archaeology’. Recipients have included some of the field’s founding figures, as well as scholars who have made seminal contributions to contemporary Social Anthropology including Marilyn Strathern, Maurice Bloch, Wendy James and Michael Herzfeld.

This is the first time the medal has been awarded to a scholar conducting anthropological research in Central Asia in its 95-year existence.

I am delighted and humbled to be recognised with the Rivers Medal. The award has been made in the past to many of the scholars whose work drew me to anthropology as a graduate student, and I'm particularly grateful to have been recognised for work that seeks to speak beyond traditional disciplinary silos to politically urgent questions of space, power and migration. It is a great mark of recognition for our small, but vibrant and growing field.
Madeleine Reeves

The RAI has also announced that Juan Del Nido, a doctoral candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the department of Social Anthropology, has been awarded the Maurice Hocart best essay prize, and the Sutasoma Award for research of potential outstanding merit. He has also been awarded prizes in 2018 by the American Ethnologist and the Society for Latin American Studies.

“It was an honour to receive these awards from an institution of such global prestige,” said Juan. “I am grateful in particular to my supervisors, Dr. Stef Jansen and Dr. Angela Torresan, for their rigour and encouragement, and to the Department as a whole for a fertile intellectual atmosphere for graduate students to thrive in.”

Share this page