2025 Prize Winners

The 2025 Early Career Researcher Prize was awarded to William Jamieson for Demarcating the granular frontier: planetary urbanization without an inside. Honorable Mentions went to Alexander Ferrer for Corporate practices of racial banishment in Los Angeles and Yu-Shan Tseng for Minor geographies of resistance in platform cities: interstices, intensities, and directions.

Winner

William Jamieson

I am a geographer committed to developing creative approaches to critical questions of urbanization and the global sand crisis. The paper emerged from previous work I had done on Singapore's granular geographies, and trying to connect it to a more global picture of sand as an urban resource which is simultaneously a materiality. Singapore still figures as a case study, but as exemplary of global trends in sand consumption. At the same time, it was trying to make sense of how sand figured in the urban process, and the cracks it might trace in planetary urbanization and its intersection with global trade and sea level rise.

Honourable Mentions

Alexander Ferrer

My article, Corporate Practices of Racial Banishment, is based on research I am conducting for my doctoral dissertation in Geography at UCLA. The dissertation, and this article, are based in a so far 3 year participatory action research project with the Tenant Power Toolkit (TPT), a community-university partnership between scholars working from UCLA's Institute on Inequality and Democracy and Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, tenant organizers within the Los Angeles Tenants Union and Debt Collective, and legal aid attorneys at the Inner City Law Center which provides legal mutual aid tools to tenants facing eviction and attempts to collect on post-eviction rent debts, and is now facilitating answers in nearly 15% of all evictions in Los Angeles County. In this project I work alternatively as a data scientist for the TPT's eviction defense, a debtor organizer with the Debt Collective, and occasionally on my dissertation.

In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, TPT staff noticed that a pattern of unusually high rent burden and racially disproportionate eviction filing was emerging, a pattern that preliminary research indicated was being driven by corporate landlords. This paper was an attempt to interrogate, both social-scientifically and politically, the specific actors and practices driving this trend. Moving from an analysis of eviction answer filings, to strategic corporate research, and to interviews with affected tenants and debtors suffering from and fighting back against eviction and indebtedness, I was able to bring to light a previously unseen racial geography of eviction characteristic of racial banishment, implicate concretely the actors and practices involved in constituting the grossly disproportionate eviction and indebtedness of Black tenants, and gesture towards a then nascent but now very real organized response. More importantly, the paper's publication contributed to bringing valuable attention to that ongoing response, a campaign of tenants and former tenants to bring accountability to Equity Residential, one of the implicated landlords.

Yu-Shan Tseng

I received a PhD in human geography at Durham University in 2020 (officially awarded in 2021) and am a Senior (Anniversary) Research Fellow in human geography at the University of Southampton. My primary research critically reimagines democracy — participation, decision-making and resistance — from the everydayness of digital cities. This is done through a comparative ethnography, distilling conceptual and practical insights on political and socio-economic issues through uncovering 'hidden' connections between cities not commonly paired (e.g. Helsinki and Taipei).

My paper on 'minor geographies of resistance' demonstrates a slow, long-term and strategic deployment of comparative ethnography for generating new, empirically grounded concept that unsettle what is normatively assumed as resistance and its spatial-power relationships in platform cities. This comparative journey is challenging yet acutely embodies the spirit of minoritoisation in its transformation of 'major theories and geographies' from within and without (the lived experiences of minor cities). This includes: 1) utilising underused data from the PhD and thickening it with a new case study in Helsinki and a follow-up investigation in Taipei during the postdoc at the University of Helsinki; 2) re-grounding minor theory in the digital everydayness of Taipei and Helsinki through revisions to arrive at the new conceptualisation. Minor geographies are not a destination for domination but an opening for these ‘not-yet’ cities to become minoritised.