STAND Early Career Prize 2023

The Commission on Science, Technology and Diplomacy is pleased to announce that Dr Alma Igra is recipient of its 2023 Early Career Prize for her paper ‘British Scientific Humanitarianism in Vienna: Milk and Standards in Exchange‘. Out of an exceptionally strong set of submissions, two additional papers merited recognition as Honourable Mentions: Timothy Sim, for ‘Global Recognition without Regional Relevance: Singapore’s International Engagements in Mosquito Control and Public Health in the 1970s and 1980s’, and Gloria Maritza Gómez Revuelta, for ‘Cosmic Diplomacy: The Global Equator and the Geostationary Orbit, 1975-1982’.

Winner:

The winner of the STAND Early Career Prize 2023 is an outstanding work in the field of humanitarianism, in the interwar period. It is well researched, based on evidence, and draws interesting conclusions relating to the historical and the historiographical scene on international nutrition. This paper explores a novel topic in relation to science diplomacy, considering food and food related problems on an international and global scale. By doing so, the author also integrates discussion of scientific issues such as standardization, questioning the linearity of scientific objectivity. Another contribution of this paper was its analysis of a case focusing on the early interwar period, a period that has not featured prominently in scholarship on science diplomacy.

Honourable Mentions:

This paper wonderfully illustrates how different layers of politics shaped Singapore’s effort in engaging in the global fight for mosquito control. It examines how Singaporean public health specialists found their niche and recognition in international communities aimed to tackle infectious diseases while manoeuvring through internal conflicts within Singapore as well as wrestling with rather complicated relations with neighbouring countries. The Commission was particularly impressed with the paper’s successful efforts to de-centre the historiography on science diplomacy, as well as the creative ways in which it considers how ‘region’ affected interactions between science and diplomacy in the Cold War.

This paper discusses the case of geostationary orbit related to equatorial countries and international law concerning outer space. By centring these actors and the case within the Global Cold War, it provides a useful example of how the international conflict went far beyond the scope of the USA and USSR. The Commission valued the paper’s engaging and topical case, its explicit connection with central issues in science diplomacy, and the genuine global scale of the paper. Although centred on Mexico, it addresses other regions such as Africa and South Asia, along with an international institutional framework.