Winners 2025

2025 Best Postdoctoral Published Paper Prize by a female postdoctoral scientist or for a postdoc paper with a central gender focus or feminist epistemology.

Winner: Amalia Calderón- Argelich

 

Jury: Melissa Fernandez, Graham Mortyn and Eric Galbraith 

 

We decided to award the prize to the article  "Co-Mapping Vulnerability to Climate Gentrification in the Context of Heat: A Participatory Index at the Metropolitan Scale", published in the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy.

All submissions for this prize demonstrated excellent research, with sophisticated methodologies and arguments, and are a testament to the high academic standards and  scholarly contributions women are making in their respective fields and disciplines. So we would like to congratulate all of the authors who were nominated for their great success.

With Amalia’s piece, we were particularly impressed by the feminist research principles and practices embodied by her methods, approach and public facing recommendations. The work combines quantitative and qualitative methods to produce a novel spatial vulnerability index that predicts climate gentrification and related displacement, and moves beyond a straightforward indexing of grey and green urban infrastructure to value the social characteristics of a neighbourhood by using an intersectional feminist lens that is attentive to the lived realities of race, poverty, and inequality. Importantly, the index was constructed with deep participation of public authority experts and community activists, producing a real-world, actionable tool for metropolitan policymakers and planners to use in their practice.

Finally, as the evaluating committee, we wanted to emphasise how important this prize is in terms of recognizing and making more visible the work of women scientists. Unfortunately, the sciences are still plagued by an ongoing history that has undervalued and underrepresented women’s contributions. We are proud that through awards like this, ICTA-UAB is exposing that historic inequity and supporting efforts to build a more equitable academic playing field. 

 

2025 Best PhD Dissertation Prize for a female scientist or for a dissertation with a central gender focus or feminist epistemology.

Winner: Lucía Muñoz Sueiro

 

Jury: Fulvia Calcagni, Lewis Carl King and Michael Grelaud

 

We decided to award the prize to her thesis Tejiendo temporalidades: la cultura del esparto y su potencial postfigurativo para el decrecimiento, supervised by Giorgos Kallis, Paula Escribano and David Gilbert.

We highly valued the academic excellence and depth of her work in combining bodies of knowledge drawing on degrowth, political ecology, anthropology and history, focusing on the impact of practices of postfigurative speculation within rural and non-activists communities in the context of social-ecological crises.The rigorous and coherent entangling of conceptual frameworks, extensive archival research and multi-sited ethnography show her high theoretical and methodological maturity, while firmly adhering to ethical research principles by paying attention to anonymity, authorship and restitution to the people involved and interested in her research (also motivating the choice of writing her thesis in Spanish).

The variety of publications (calls for paper, book sections, scientific papers, etc.), theoretical frameworks and academic collaborations that her thesis builds upon, demonstrate the strong impact of her research. In addition, her brave decision of writing the thesis as a monograph, challenging the imperative of publishing scientific articles for career development, makes her even more deserving of this award in our opinion.