We are delighted to announce that this year’s Dissertation Prize on the MSc in Migration Studies has been awarded to Yolanda Lee for her work on ‘From stateless to quasi-citizens: the case of Nubians in Kenya’. The prize is awarded at the discretion of the degree’s Exam Board each year

Yolanda’s dissertation examines the problems of statelessness, citizenship and the lived experience of the Kenyan Nubians. The Examiners considered it an excellent piece of work on a range of levels and congratulated Yolanda for her thoroughness and grasp of complex issues in this extremely well written, researched and argued essay. The dissertation’s challenging theoretical framework, which integrates geographical theories of ‘space and place’ with the policy, citizenship and society debates, was intelligently and sensitively applied. And Yolanda showed a brilliant command of the literature, notably in her fluent discussion of the problems of ascribing understandings of citizenship that came from a specific historical European context to African colonies whose borders, boundaries and ‘tribes’ were in many ways ‘invented’ and structured through British colonial rule.