Alumna Mengjun Huang highly commended in DSA Masters Dissertation Prize
Congratulations to Mengjun Huang who has been highly commended in the Development Studies Association’s Masters Dissertation Prize for 2024.
Mengjun graduated from the MSc in Migration Studies at ODID in 2023.
Her dissertation, titled “Pursuing ‘Freedom’ in Beijing’s Urban Waste Economy: Desire, becoming, and loss of rural migrant waste workers in China” examined the embodied and affective experience of migrant workers in shifting urban contexts.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in various recycling sites in Beijing, it advanced a highly original argument around the concepts of “freedom” and “desirable futures” and how these can give individuals both a sense of belonging and meaning as well as of loss and detachment.
It explored ways of socialising often-mechanistic approaches in migration scholarship, and called for more attention to be paid to the disconnections that arise from increasing mobilities today.
The judges described the work as “conceptually and analytically strong, drawing on original, ethnographic fieldwork in a challenging environment, across a range of sites to ensure that the different dimensions of the work (gender roles, different migratory experiences) are brought out.
“It is located within a wider body of relevant literature, drawing on a careful scrutiny of Chinese and non-Chinese literature sources, situating this as part of a set of global issues as well as specific to the Chinese socio-political context.”
Since 2015, the DSA has awarded an annual dissertation prize to masters’ students working in the field of international development, development studies and development economics. The DSA asks all Heads of Centres of DSA-affiliated institutions in the UK to nominate the highest scoring masters’ dissertation (MA or MSc) awarded on their international development, or related subject, programmes.
The nominations are then evaluated by an academic panel from the DSA.
The overall winner in 2024 was Ana Palma Garcia from the Institute of Development Studies for her work titled “Co-constructing notions of inclusion with Deaf women in Colombia throughout cooperative inquiry“.