Category Archives: Awards

Harold K. Schneider Student Prize: deadline extended to June 10, 2022

The deadline for the 2022 Harold K. Schneider Student Prize in Economic Anthropology has been extended to Friday, June 10, 2022.

DEADLINE: June 10, 2022

The Harold K. Schneider Prize Competition is a student paper competition established by the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) to honor its first president and to encourage new scholars in the field of economic anthropology. Harold Schneider, Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, was known for both his path breaking research and his dedication as a teacher.

Each year, the SEA invites both undergraduate and graduate students to submit papers on any aspect of economic anthropology or economic archaeology. Papers should contain a central thesis or argument, should be neither wholly descriptive nor wholly theoretical but, ideally, both and should be edited for clarity.

The winners in both the undergraduate and graduate categories will each receive a cash prize, a certificate of achievement, and a year’s membership in the SEA. The graduate winner will also be invited to make a presentation at the annual spring meeting of the SEA.

Further details about the competition can be found on the Schneider Prize web page.

2022 M. Estellie Smith Dissertation Fund awardees

Hello Economic Anthropologists,

On behalf of the M. Estellie Smith Dissertation Award Committee (myself, Ipshita Ghosh, and Shelly Biesel) I am pleased to announce this year’s winner:

Adrian Wilson, University of California Berkeley, for his project entitled, “The Economic Imaginaries of Evidence-Based Development in East Africa.”

Adrian is taking a hard look at how development workers in Kenya are testing and implementing the kinds of experimental development projects championed by recent Nobel laureates Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer, champions of randomized controlled trials. (Adrian’s abstract is pasted at the end of this message).

It was a very hard decision, as we received many wonderful proposals that were worthy of funding. If you or your student applied but was not awarded, giant pats on the back are well deserved!

Thanks, and here’s Adrian’s abstract:

“This project is a multi-sited ethnographic research study of the scientific field of “evidence-based development” research in East Africa — of the development economists who design such research, the research staff who carry it out, and the research participants whose behaviors and thought processes are being studied. My aim is not so much to describe the economic, political, and social interventions made by researchers operating in field (others have already done so) as to analyze this field as a site at which different understandings of the economic — held by development economists, researchers, and research participants — intersect and interact.”

Bram Tucker
Chair, M. Estellie Smith Dissertation Award