Audrey Richards prize
for the best doctoral thesis in African Studies

The Audrey Richards Prize is awarded biennially for the best doctoral thesis in African Studies which has been successfully examined in a United Kingdom institute of higher education during the two calendar years immediately preceding the 2014 ASAUK Conference.

The 2012 and 2013 prize will be for theses examined between 1 January 2012 and 31 December 2013.

Nominations must be made by supervisors or examiners, with the permission of the candidate, by 31st March 2014 and should be submitted to;

Professor David Maxwell
Emmanuel College
St Andrew’s Street
Cambridge
CB2 3AP

Djm223(AT)cam.ac.uk

Nominations should be accompanied by a supporting letter (no more than 300 words), a copy of the thesis, and where possible a copy of the examiners’ report. The recommendation for the award will be made by the Vice-President of ASAUK supported where necessary by Council colleagues.

The winner will be announced at the September Annual General Meeting of the ASAUK and the prize presented at the ASAUK Conference in September 2014.

David Maxwell
Vice-President, ASAUK

The winner of the 2012 Audrey Richards Prize  (theses from 2010 and 2011)

Fibian Lukalo, University of Cambridge. Educating Daughters, Educating Sons: Mothers and Schooling in Rural Kenya.

From the 14 ASAUK Newsletter No. 69 (pdf): " This thesis offers a subtle ethnography of women’s lives and their roles and duties as mothers in rural Kenya, showing how women are shaped by the gender structures around them, but also highlighting the ways in which individuality matters in such intimate, personal relations."

The runners-up were Zoe Groves, University of Keele: Malawians in Colonial Salisbury: a Social History of Migration in Central Africa, c.1920-1960 and Maxim Bolt, LSE: Rooting Production: Life and Labour on the Settler Farms of the Zimbabwean-South African Border.

Previous Winners

2010

Winner Hassanali Sachedin, Oxford University Wildlife is Our Oil: Conservation, Livelihoods and NGOs in the Tarangire Ecosystem, Tanzania.
Runner-up    

2008

Winner Fraser McNeil, LSE An Ethnographic Analysis of HIV/AIDS in the Venda Region of South Africa: Politics Peer Education and Music
Winner Ruth Marshall, University of Oxford The Politics of Pentecostalism in Nigeria, 1975-2000
Runner-up    

2006

Winner Dr Williams Oliver Norman, LSE Living on the Frontline: Politics, Migration and Transfrontier Conversation in the Mozambican Villages of the Mozambique-South Africa Borderland
Winner Dr Samuel Cyuma, OCMS, Oxford Conflict Reconciliation in South Africa (1990-1998) and its Significance for Mediating Role of the Church in Rwanda 1990-2003
Runner-up Dr Kate Meagher, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford Identity Economics: Informal Manufacturing and Social Networks in South-Eastern Nigeria

2004

Winner Joost Fontein, Edinburgh The silence of Great Zimbabwe: contested landscapes and the power of heritage
Runner-up Rebekah Lee, Oxford Locating ‘Home’: strategies of settlement, identity-formation and social change among African women in Cape Town, 1948-2000
Runner-up Mattia Fumanti, Manchester Youth, elites and distinction in a northern Namibian town

2002

Winner Helen Tilley, Oxford The African Research Survey and the British Colonial Empire: consolidating environmental, medical, and anthropological debates 1920-1940
Runner-up Monica Bungaro, Birmingham New cartographies in recent African fiction: changing patterns in the representation of female characters
Runner-up Michael Taylor, Edinburgh Life, land and power: contesting development in Northern Botswana

2000

Winner Ruth Watson, Oxford Chieftaincy politics and civic consciousness in Ibadan history, 1829-1939
Runner-up Annette Czekelius, SOAS Artistry and effectiveness in language use: the evaluation of ways of speaking among the Berba of Benin
Runner-up Jessica Schafer, Oxford Soldiers at peace: the post-war politics of demobilised soldiers in Mozambique, 1964-1996

1998

Winner John Murton, Cambridge Coping with more people: population growth, non-farm income and economic differentiation in Machakos District, Kenya
Runner-up Andrea Cornwall, SOAS For money, children and peace: everyday struggles in changing times in Ado-Ado, Southwestern Nigeria
Runner-up Frederick Rohde, Edinburgh Nature, cattle thieves and various other midnight robbers: images of people, place and landscape in Damaraland, Namibia

1996

Winner David Maxwell, Oxford A social and conceptual history of North-East Zimbabwe, 1890-1990
Runner-up John Parker, SOAS Ga State and Society in early colonial Accra, 1860s-1920s
Runner-up Andrew Bank, Cambridge Liberals and their enemies: racial ideology at the Cape of Good Hope, 1820-1850

1994

Winner Caroline Orwin, SOAS “Yodit”