The following students have been awarded MPhil in Development Studies prizes for 2015:

Lucia Rost has been awarded the Papiya Ghosh Thesis Prize.

Julie Dayot and Ikuno Naka have been awarded the Eugene Havas Memorial Prize for the best overall performance in the MPhil in Development Studies.

Congratulations to all three!

Lucia's thesis, 'Sharing the caring: a mixed methods approach to intra-household decision-making on care and domestic work in Northern Uganda', investigates decision-making in relation to the division of care and domestic work between husbands and wives in Northern Uganda. Lucia used a mixed methods approach, including a household survey and focus group discussions (together with Oxfam GB’s WE-Care Initiative), semi-structured interviews and participant observation.

Results highlight that women undertake significantly more care and domestic work and total work than men. Women with more bargaining power — conceptualised as hours of economic activity and control over income — spend less time on household work as a primary activity. However, husbands of women who undertake more economic activity and have greater control over income do not spend more time on care and domestic work.

The qualitative data provides two social norms explanations for these results. First, social norms might shape women’s preferences not to bargain for their husbands to undertake household work, as care work is perceived as 'naturally' and 'culturally' 'women’s work'. Second, due to benefits of compliance and costs of non-compliance with social norms, women might make conscious decisions not to negotiate for their husbands’ participation in care and domestic work. The thesis encourages further research on the role of social norms in household bargaining on time use.

Lucia will extend her research as part of a DPhil in International Development.

Julie studied Economics at the Ecole Normale Superieure (France) from 2010. As she completed her studies, and after a one-year break during which she travelled to South America, her interests shifted towards development topics, marginalised in Economics, and notably the dilemmas between development, ecological and cultural conservation.

This led her, for her thesis, to analyse the perceptions and responses of indigenous communities to a dilemma between socio-economic development (schools, health centres, etc.) and the preservation of their ecological and cultural ‘difference’ (in Escobar’s words), both accompanying oil extraction projects in their territories. She will continue working on this topic for her DPhil at ODID.

After leaving the finance industry, Ikuno came to ODID with a desire to understand more deeply the structural dynamics underlying and theoretical discourses surrounding the field of International Development.

With an academic background in urban theory and history, in her MPhil, she expanded upon her academic interests by examining the more contemporary and increasingly financialised forms of urban development taking place in India's second-tier cities; an area she hopes to continue exploring in her DPhil at ODI