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PRIZE-WINNING MASTER'S DISSERTATIONS
14 January 2025

Publication of 2024 prize-winning master’s dissertations: Showcasing the diversity of our students’ work

Since 2020, the Vahabzadeh Foundation has funded the publication of several master’s dissertations written by students of the Geneva Graduate Institute. In 2024, Jasmine Yoojin Have, Agathe Le Vaslot and Krithi D. Ramaswamy had their prize-winning dissertations published in the Institute’s open access ePapers series. 

Dealing respectively with the role of indigenous knowledge in development projects, India’s use of altruistic incentives to support its community health worker programmes, and the socio-cultural significance of glaciers in the midst of melting ice in the Swiss and French Alps, the three prize-winning papers illustrate the rich diversity of subjects explored by our students:

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ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT PRIZE – HONOURABLE MENTION:

Melting Landscapes: Human-Glacier Relations in Chamonix’s Mer de Glace

What is the significance of the retreat and disappearance of glaciers in Europe’s Alpine regions? What new socialities might emerge in a landscape characterised by melt and loss? Jasmine Yoojin Have delves into the sociocultural dimensions of glacial retreat and melt, as part of the broader phenomena of environmental and climate change, in two regions of the French and Swiss Alps.

The dynamics of human-nature interactions in the context of environmental change continue to inform and inspire Jasmine in her current work in the international development sector at UNESCO.

Yoojin Have, Jasmine. Melting Landscapes: Human-Glacier Relations in Chamonix’s Mer de Glace. Geneva Graduate ePapers 51, Genève: Graduate Institute Publications, 2024. https://doi.org/10.4000/129u9.

ASSOCIATION GENÈVE-ASIE PRIZE:

Development Actors and Their Indigenous Other: Knowledge Production and Negotiation in the Upper Baram (Malaysia)

In recent years, many development projects have focused on the empowerment of so-called “beneficiaries”, particularly in contexts affecting the livelihoods of indigenous populations. Exploring knowledge production and governmentality in the design and early implementation of the Upper Baram Forest Conservation Project in Sarawak, Malaysia, Agathe Le Vaslot finds that local communities were excluded from meaningful acknowledgement and participation. 

Passionate about human rights, visual arts and cultural mediation, Agathe is currently in charge of cultural and educational mediation at the Geneva International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights. 

Le Vaslot, Agathe. Development Actors and Their Indigenous Other. Knowledge Production and Negotiation in the Upper Baram (Malaysia). Geneva Graduate ePapers 52, Graduate Institute Publications, 2024, https://doi.org/10.4000/126fk.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT PRIZE – LAUREATE:

The Making of Good Work and Good People: Ethical Liberation in and through ASHA Work

Krithi Ramaswamy critically examines community health schemes in India through the lens of one of the largest cadres of community health workers in the world, the Accredited Social Health Activists or ASHAs. She finds that ideologies of altruistic service and morality are embedded in state narratives of social welfare and are used to undervalue the work of women from marginalised communities within public health care systems. At the same time, workers create complex social ties and narratives of community and care to negotiate their precarious working conditions and advocate for their rights and their position within spaces of informalised formal work.

Ramaswamy, Krithi D. The Making of Good Work and Good People: Ethical Liberation in and through ASHA Work. Geneva Graduate ePapers 53, Graduate Institute Publications, 2024, https://doi.org/10.4000/12dtj.

Banner image: Chamonix’s Mer de Glace by Jasmine Yoojin Have.