Global Development Section
Book Award

The International Studies Association (ISA) Global Development Studies (GDS) section is pleased to announce the call for nominations for the GDS Book Prize. Books should meet the goals of the section, including a scholarly concern with development and global justice working across a number of fields, for example, postcolonial studies, development studies, critical political economy, critical security studies, social and political theory, history, sociology, gender studies, and public policy.

General Information

Nominations must meet the Following Criteria

Book must be published in 2023-2024
Book must be a monograph (cannot be an edited volume)
Self-nominations are accepted; nominee and nominator must be current ISA members
Nominations are not accepted from publishers
The Nominator should write a 300-500 word justification to be sent to the GDS Book Award Committee Chair, Lisa Tilley, at gdsbookaward@gmail.com, by June 30th 2024.
The committee will, to the best of its ability, consider books written language other than English
Members currently holding any leadership positions in ISA are ineligible for the award

Prize

The recipient will receive a certificate and $500.

Selection Process

Nominee/nominator are responsible for getting the publisher to send a copy of the book of the committee members (see list below). In case of a non-English text, work with the Committee Chair and GDS to facilitate the necessary steps (cf. translation) for a fair inclusion of the text in the award process.
Deadline for nominations: June 30th, 2024. Please email them to gdsbookaward@gmail.com.
Deadline for receiving hard/physical copies of books by committee: August 30th, 2024. Soft copies accepted only under exceptional circumstances, particularly if the publisher is based in the Global South.

* By the middle to end of July, the GDS Book Award Committee will reach out to selected candidates about where to send their books *

COMMITTEE

Lisa Tilley, SOAS, University of London (Chair)
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, The New School
Akta Rao, The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Shiera Malik, DePaul University
Rafael Bittencourt Rodrigues Lopes, Federal University of Goiás (UFG)
Adhemar Mercado, Universidad Católica Boliviana San Pablo Cochabamba

2024 WINNER

Jordanna Matlon

*A Man among Other Men* examines competing constructions of modern manhood in the West African metropolis of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Engaging the histories, representational repertoires, and performative identities of men in Abidjan and across the Black Atlantic, Jordanna Matlon shows how French colonial legacies and media tropes of Blackness act as powerful axes, rooting masculine identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification. Through a broad chronological and transatlantic scope that culminates in a deep ethnography of the livelihoods and lifestyles of men in Abidjan's informal economy, Matlon demonstrates how men's subjectivities are formed in dialectical tension by and through hegemonic ideologies of race and patriarchy. A *Man among Other Men* provides a theoretically innovative, historically grounded, and empirically rich account of Black masculinity that illuminates the sustained power of imaginaries even as capitalism affords a deficit of material opportunities. Revealed is a story of Black abjection set against the anticipation of male privilege, a story of the long crisis of Black masculinity in racial capitalism. This book has received honorable mentions by the African Studies Association Best Book Prize, by the American Anthropological Association Society for the Anthropology of Work Best Book, and multiple honorable mentions by the American Sociological Association (Sociology of Development Section; Race, Gender, and Class Section; and Sociology of Sex and Gender Section).

2023 HONORABLE MENTIONS

Namita Vijay Dharia (Rhode Island School of Design) - Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction (University of California Press, 2022)

What transformative effects does a multimillion-dollar industry have on those who work within it? The Industrial Ephemeral presents the untold stories of the people, politics, and production chains behind architecture, real estate, and construction in areas surrounding New Delhi, India. The personal histories of those in India's large laboring classes are brought to life as Namita Vijay Dharia discusses the aggressive environmental and ecological metamorphosis of the region in the twenty-first century. Urban planning and architecture are messy processes that intertwine migratory pathways, corruption politics, labor struggle, ecological transformations, and technological development. Rampant construction activity produces an atmosphere of ephemerality in urban regions, creating an aesthetic condition that supports industrial political economy. Dharia's brilliant analysis of the sensibilities and experiences of work lends visibility to the struggle of workers in an era of growing urban inequality.

Victor Seow (Harvard University) - Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022)

A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine. The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality. In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth. Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.