Stephanie Bell has won the 2012 Papiya Ghosh Prize for her thesis for the MPhil in Development Studies.

Stephanie is a Rhodes Scholar whose research interests include activism, civic engagement, and education. Her MPhil thesis, 'Unequal Education? Knowledge-based limitations on substantive citizenship in South Africa,' used ethnographic methods to analyse how access to knowledge affected activist groups engaging with government to improve South Africa's education system.

In October, she will begin a doctorate at Oxford in the Department of Politics and International Relations, under the supervision of Jocelyn Alexander from ODID and Marc Stears from DPIR. 

She intends to build on her MPhil research by examining the same subject through the frameworks of democratic theory, interrogating what the limits of technocratic knowledge mean for our understandings of democratic systems as well as for citizen participation.