Eyes on the Prize: Awards, Decolonization, and the ASA Graduate Student Paper Prize 

Kristin D. Phillips (Emory University) Kristen E. Cheney (Erasmus University, Rotterdam)

If we open the walls of our institutions physically and epistemically…our contributions to the world will be sharper, more just, and infinitely more rigorous in understanding and shaping the world.

Shose Kessi, Zoe Marks, & Elelwani Ramugondo, in “Decolonizing African Studies” (2020)

This special issue of the African Studies Review commemorates the twentieth anniversary of the African Studies Association’s (ASA) Graduate Student Paper Prize. In 2001, the African Studies Association’s Board of Directors established the annual prize for the best graduate student paper presented at the previous year’s Annual Meeting. This special issue is dedicated to re-releasing the eleven articles published since 2001 in ASR by winners of the Graduate Student Paper Prize (hereafter, “the GSP Prize”). Each year, in the months following the annual meeting, graduate students who have presented papers have the opportunity to submit them for prize consideration along with a letter of support from their faculty advisor. A committee of scholars vets the entries chooses a winner and announces it at the following year’s Annual Meeting. The author of the winning essay is invited to submit it to the African Studies Review, the ASA’s flagship journal, for expedited peer review. If it is recommended for publication, the article appears in the next June issue.

The authors of this introduction—Kristin Phillips & Kristen Cheney—accepted an open invitation from ASR editor Benjamin Lawrance to all published prizewinners to introduce this special issue and to offer some commentary on the role of the award itself in ASA and the lives of its winners. An initial scan of the authors’ identities, affiliations, and articles motivated us to reach out to this dynamic group of scholars to organize a conversation about the life, past, and future of the GSP Prize in a moment of historical transformation and reckoning in African Studies at large. We, therefore, spoke to past winners of the award whose pieces were subsequently published in ASR—and are republished in this issue—in a virtual focus group discussion in June 2021.¹ The few who were unable to join us submitted their reflections via email. They shared insights about the relevance of the GSP Prize for their personal careers, how they think the award-winning papers have influenced the field of African Studies, and reflections on the structure of the award as it relates to ongoing conversations about decolonization in African Studies.

In this introduction, we situate our analysis of the GSP Prize in our discussion with past prizewinners, a review of the sociological literature on awards, and scholarly critiques of the history of African Studies in the United States. We argue that the GSP Prize has played an important role in drawing rising young scholars into the ASA who have pushed the thematic and theoretical boundaries of the field. It has also offered these young scholars valuable recognition and an opportunity to publish early in their careers. But these contributions have been attended by limitations that the ASA and the ASR should remediate as they consider the GSP Prize in the context of today’s academic climate—a climate that encourages self-reflection and anti-colonial, social justice-oriented approaches to knowledge production. There is therefore room for improvement and a re-envisioning of the role of awards in the Association’s ongoing efforts to decolonize African Studies.

Consecration, Induction, and Colonization: Theorizing Awards Western academia has long been premised on the organization of scholars not simply into localized interdisciplinary institutions of higher learning, but into more specialized national and international academies, learned societies, and professional associations. This form of associational life emerged and proliferated between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. As James F. English describes in The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, these associations developed a widespread custom of awarding prizes, medals, and trophies to individuals from diverse fields of cultural production and presenting them with “special tokens of esteem” (2005: 1) in “a highly ritualized theater of gestures and countergestures” (2005: 5).

Such “tokens of esteem” have played a particularly important role in the field of scholarly production which holds itself to standards at least partially outside the marketplace of creative supply and popular demand. Pierre Bourdieu theorized this distinction as one between a “field of restricted production” (i.e. scholarship) and a “field of large-scale cultural production” (i.e. mass consumption). The former involves cultural goods produced for an audience of other producers (i.e. peers, or in Bourdieu’s words, “privileged clients and competitors”). The latter tends to be governed by market principles of mass consumption, where success in the field is determined by the scale of uptake by non-producers of a particular cultural product. A scholarly community like African Studies is a field of restricted production that has developed its own criteria for evaluating its cultural goods, though a sub-field of large-scale production (for example, textbooks for undergraduate audiences or popular novels and films) also exists within this restricted space.

Best (2008) asserts that awards-giving tends to be constituted by three stages: establishment, selection, and presentation. A group of people establishes an award by defining its terms and selection processes, identifying sources for its costs, and announcing it. An appointed group encourages submission and selects who will receive the award in a given cycle. They then announce the result and present the award to its recipient. Awards-granting is certainly generous (benefitting recipients with prestige and its attendant material rewards) and generative (incentivizing creativity, association, and affiliation). However, Best (2008) notes that winners are not the only beneficiaries. Awards-granting confers prestige and reputation on judges and on the institutions affiliated with winners. Awards ceremonies affirm the audience, its values, and its solidarity. And awards serve the granting organizations themselves by establishing and confirming the organization’s monopoly over what Bourdieu (1993) calls the “consecration” of scholarly producers. To put it more clearly, awards tend to lay claim to a particular field of knowledge, and they constitute and communicate the legitimacy and authority of an organization to establish standards, set agendas, and police the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Associations are not natural phenomena, emerging with clear boundaries, identities, and purposes. Rather they require considerable social and political work to cultivate a sense of purpose, definition, authority and belonging to a knowledge community. Below, we describe the impacts of such “consecration” on individual award winners and their scholarly trajectories. Later, we return to the particular politics of knowledge communities within African Studies.  

The African Studies Association Graduate Student Paper Prize As mentioned already, the GSP Prize emerged in 2001 to recognize an exceptional paper by a graduate student who presented at the previous year’s annual meeting. The winner has the opportunity to develop the paper for publication in ASR. What distinguishes the GSP Prize from other awards like the ASA Book Prize (formerly the Herskovits Prize), the Ogot Book Prize, and the ASA Film Prize is its focus on emerging scholars. A specific aim of the award is to identify, induct, even “capture” students at a moment when they may be exploring and soon committing to one or more of several possible scholarly communities. The GSP Prize, therefore, functions to assist with the social reproduction of the organization (by providing an incentive for students to attend the annual meeting) and to expand the core of the organization by curating and amplifying promising young voices.

Effects on Winners’ Personal Career Trajectories and Scholarly Identities To some extent, our conversation with past Prize winners affirmed the idea of awards as ‘tokens of esteem’ that influenced to varying degrees their confidence as scholars. It also tended to advance their career trajectories by amplifying their contributions to African Studies and solidifying their participation and identification with the field as a scholarly community. First and foremost, prizewinners agreed that the honor helped them in their careers, directly and indirectly. Several scholars noted that winning the GSP Prize gave them confidence in the quality of their work. Shaonan Liu wrote:

Winning the ASA graduate student paper prize in 2018 meant a lot to me. First, it helped establish my confidence as a junior scholar in my career, and I learned a lot from the publication process, like how to make a dissertation chapter into a journal article for the ASR. Benjamin Lawrance, the first GSP Prize recipient and now Editor of ASR, also felt that it was very helpful and important for his career development—particularly because the GSP Prize chair gave very helpful comments. Bert Ingelaere, who won the GSP Prize in 2010, also noted that, as a graduate student struggling to find his disciplinary home at the time, it helped reaffirm the quality of his work as well as its validity for African Studies.

For many winners, the GSP Prize paper and its subsequent publication process inducted them as emerging scholars in African Studies by helping them with the development of their dissertations. Kristen Cheney won the GSP Prize in 2004, the year she finished her dissertation, so she felt that getting the award and going through the publication process helped work out the place of the topic in her dissertation as well. For 2017 winner Amanda B. Edgell, on the other hand, presenting the paper at the ASA helped work out a piece of Ph.D. fieldwork that did not fit neatly into her dissertation:

…it was a paper idea that came out of fieldwork but that didn’t really fit nicely into the overall dissertation project. And so it really encouraged me to continue to pursue that paper—and gave me the opportunity to do that, and get the structured feedback I needed [in order] to push the project forward.

Many felt that winning the GSP Prize helped them to get a job once they finished graduate school. Habtamu Tegegne, 2007 winner, wrote that “Several of the jobs I applied [for] including the job I am at now asked for [a] strong publication record. I presented this paper at my on-campus interviews, and it helped me get my current job.” 2006 winner Severine Autesserre added:

I have been at Barnard for close to 15 years—it has been my first and only faculty position. I genuinely believe that the Graduate Student Paper Prize helped me get this job. As far as I know, there were hundreds of applications for the position when I applied in 2006 (i.e. shortly after being awarded the GSP Prize). At that time, there probably wasn’t much that made my application stand out. My dissertation research was solid, and I’m sure that my doctoral supervisors wrote lovely and supportive letters, but I suspect that 90% of the other candidates had similarly strong research projects and supportive reference letters. Being a “prize winning” grad student is probably what made me stand out—and thus be invited for an interview, and eventually be offered the position (as tenure-track Assistant Professor).

Victoria Gorham, 2019 winner, also felt that winning the GSP Prize and publishing the paper helped her secure an assistant professor position at the same place where she was doing a post-doctoral fellowship at the time. Most importantly, perhaps, many of the recipients felt that the GSP Prize rooted them in African Studies as an academic discipline—even though many are currently situated in different departments, from history to development studies to anthropology to political science. For example, Kathleen Klaus, 2015 winner, feels that the GSP Prize bound her to the African Studies community:

I think it’s more a matter of what it signals and how it binds each of us into this African Studies community. Especially, as a political scientist, I’m always trying to prove that I am also part of—and really value—African Studies. So in that regard I think it’s a nice way of signaling my engagement with area studies, and African Studies specifically.

Kristin D. Phillips, 2008 winner, said,

For me it very much cemented part of my academic identity as being within African Studies… Each of my postgraduate positions has actually been very defined by African Studies. And I think that the award helped to cement that as part of how I saw myself as a scholar and a teacher, and also how others saw me, and it’s pulled me in… Since I started presenting at ASA, it has become one of my central scholarly communities and homes. The Paper Prize was certainly part of that process.

For Autesserre, winning the GSP Prize even helped cement her identity as an academic more broadly:

Receiving the Graduate Student Paper Prize is one of the reasons why I work in academia. Until I received this award, I had never thought that academia might be for me. I’m a first-generation college student—neither of my parents graduated from high school—and I had a rocky time at school until well into my first year in college, so it never occurred to me that I may have the skills and knowledge (or, for that matter, the desire) to be a professor. I also felt like a misfit in my doctoral program... And then I received this prize, and a job offer at Barnard, and I started thinking that maybe—just maybe—this might be a career path worth exploring. 

In addition to winning the GSP Prize itself, recipients appreciated the editorial support for publishing their pieces, as most of them were going through that process for the first time. For Cheney and Ingelaere, their Prize papers remain among the most read and cited of their careers.

In these important regards, then, the GSP Prize has succeeded in amplifying the work of promising, young scholars, as well as cementing their sense of belonging to the field, and even to academia more broadly.

Effects of the Award on the Field of African Studies Beyond the personal benefits, past prizewinners agreed that the award does important work for the ASA and the field of African Studies more broadly. Established in 1957, the United States-based ASA was born of a desire to redress what was seen as a lack of interest, attention, and support for the study of the African continent in American higher education. Early efforts by the Association’s founders garnered the support of the U.S. government, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation, and the institutionalization of African Studies took form over the next several decades in the founding of Title VI African Studies Centers funded by the Higher Education Act (Pritchett 2014). Such centers promoted the study of African languages and area studies with strategic importance for the United States’ security.

The organization today “encourages the production and dissemination of historical and contemporary knowledge about Africa,” including its “political, economic, social, cultural, artistic, scientific, and environmental landscapes” (ASA website, accessed September 7, 2021). Through its journals, annual meetings, exchange programs, and enhancement of scholarly and policy networks, the organization boasts over 2000 members. For many scholars, ASA has provided a refuge from disciplinary scholarly associations where theory and research related to the African continent are often marginalized as too exceptional to contribute to mainstream scholarship. As Adam Branch has argued in his analysis of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cambridge, it is the work of African Studies organizations to insist that

African political thought is political thought, in addition to being African Studies; African economic history is economic history and African literature is literature in addition to being African Studies. As Elísio Macomo puts it, ‘Africa is what it is because of what the world is like, and vice versa. So we study Africa to understand the world’ (2018: 8).

To be sure, ASA—like other African Studies institutions—has helped to incubate and center scholarship related to the African continent on its own terms, supporting Branch’s assertion that disciplinary knowledge can be honed through the study of Africa, and that Africa can help us know the world.

Past prizewinners tended to agree that the GSP Prize enhances African Studies by embracing new and innovative research, encouraging young scholars in the field, and expanding disciplinary thematics to accept and legitimize certain subfields. Gorham, who wrote in 2020 about the construction of national narratives in state-run museum spaces, said,

A dissertation committee member...encouraged me to submit the paper after seeing the presentation, and I had a couple of other conversations with people at the meeting about how I should retool the paper and submit it. It was validating to see that this kind of work was valued and [that I could get] some feedback about this wonky little project I was working on that isn’t common in political science that was just part of my dissertation because I loved it. I thought that was a really helpful part of the conference experience and I gained the confidence to think that this paper was enough to stand on its own.

However, Klaus also pointed out that deeper engagement with prizewinners and with the scholarship itself might help the GSP Prize to make a more lasting impact on the field of African Studies:

...it does feel like these prizes are awarded and then life moves on, and scholarship moves on, and these papers get lost. That’s one reason why I think it’s neat that we’re bringing these [papers] together... this is exactly the type of engagement, I think, that should be happening for there to actually be greater significance for African Studies.

Past recipients also felt that winning the GSP Prize helped legitimate their particular subfield within African Studies—itself already quite broad and interdisciplinary—whether that was children and youth studies (Cheney), museum studies (Gorham), or Africa-China relations (Liu). Gorham noted, “I didn’t really know that I would care that much about museums in Tanzania, but it was something that I really loved that I just wanted to work on…”, so receiving the GSP Prize helped highlight museums on the continent as a topic of import for African Studies.

Liu similarly noted that,

...from the list of previous winners, it seems that I was the first Chinese (probably also the first East Asian or Asian) student/scholar who got the GSP Prize, and the news was publicized and celebrated among the Chinese Africanists’ circle at that time. It was a breakthrough and encouragement to the whole community of Chinese Africanists. I think the ASA/ASR also paid great attention to the topic of my article—the historical connection between Nigeria and China—that can speak to the cutting-edge area of Africa-China studies. ASA and ASR acknowledged the importance of the emerging new area of Africa-China relation studies.

This legitimation also extended to national studies within the continental study of Africa: Tegegne noted, for example, that winning the GSP Prize “brought more critical attention to the field of Ethiopian studies and in particular to the role of property in early modern Ethiopia.”

The Social and Political Work of Awards in African Studies As we celebrate the award and its role in the ASA, however, it is vital to note the questions and critiques that have arisen in recent years regarding the hard-wiring of white privilege (Allman 2019: 6) into the structures and processes of African Studies through gate-keeping mechanisms that obscure the intellectual leadership and contributions of Black scholars. Indeed, the ASA’s early claims of knowledge production about the African continent in terms of its detachment from historical relations of lineage, geography, and colonialism (Herskovits 1958, in Allman 2019) have been widely problematized by scholars like Adomako Ampofo (2016), Iheka & Lawrance (2021), Amina Mama (2007), William G. Martin (2011), Oyekan Owomoyelo (1994), James Pritchett (2014), and Pearl Robinson (2007).

Robinson (2007) observed that Title VI centers and their networks were one of only three “worlds” of African area studies; that is, “three spatially-differentiated spheres of endeavor” (235) that also include diasporic scholars, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) on the one hand, and African universities and research networks based on the African continent. She argues,

Each of these Worlds has its own complex sociology of intellectual pace-setters, respected elders, epistemological debates, citation conventions, overlapping memberships, and identity politics configured around a mix of symbolic and substantive associations with the production and validation of knowledge about Africa. (235)

In addition to Robinson’s three U.S.- and Africa-based worlds of inquiry, there exist also regionally based African Studies organizations in Europe (AEGIS) and Australasia and the Pacific (AFSAAP); as well as country-based associations like those in Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, Netherlands, and Russia.

Despite the hubris of the African Studies Association’s moniker, which suggests the universalism and comprehensiveness of its knowledge production, the ASA’s claims to knowledge are unsurprisingly more parochial, tending to represent mainly (though not absolutely) the first of Robinson’s worlds. That is, ASA membership has tended to be dominated by scholars in predominantly white Research I institutions, although African Studies scholars themselves at these institutions represent a wider range of origins and identities. The other two of Robinson’s “worlds” are identifiable and bound together not only by broadly shared self-definitions but also by their institutionalization in other membership-based scholarly associations.

In the diasporic world, the study of Africa has been part of intellectual life since long before 1957. As William G. Martin (2011) relates, “…propelled from below by black student demands at historically black colleges and universities--the [B]lack study of an international Africa became steadily more widespread…. Carter G. Woodson led the way (69-70).” In institutional form, this diasporic network includes organizations like the African Heritage Studies Association (AHSA, which emerged directly from Black Caucus protests at the ASA meetings in Los Angeles in 1968 and Montreal in 1969; see Guedj 2016), the National Association of African-American Studies (NAAAS), and the Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), along with a plethora of diasporic discipline-specific organizations.

Unsurprisingly (and indeed it is very revealing that we even feel the need to call attention to this), African institutions also have a rich history of African Studies. Martin observes that it is rarely acknowledged that as African Studies expanded in the United States,

it was met by a broad emerging consensus by scholars on the continent: the production of knowledge needed to take place in continental Africa, by Africans… [T]hroughout the 1970s and 80s African scholars and Euro-North American scholars often pursued their work quite separate from one another, with African research centers rarely engaging in collaborative research with Northerners by choice. (2011: 75)

Still today, many Africa-based scholars prioritize memberships with Africa-based institutions such as the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), university-based African Studies centers like those at the Universities of Ibadan, Lagos, Addis Ababa, and Cape Town, as well as continent-based disciplinary organizations whose knowledge production and relevance to the continent are more self-evident.² But this rift bears important consequences for scholars on the continent. As Professor Nana Akua Anyidoho of the University of Ghana observed of the U.S.-centrism of African Studies at the 2018 ASA Annual Meeting:

…We have a dominant academy in the most dominant country in the world with both black and white academics studying and relating to a continent whose academics are often sidelined in the investigation of their own societies. And that’s very important. (Anyidoho 2018)

This history points to the segmentation of African Studies that have occurred throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Best (2008) argues that current social conditions foster this kind of segmentation: “…they make it easy for people to break off to form new social worlds” (2008). This segmentation, in turn, compels a desire for legitimation and distinction:

Emerging social worlds must be able to articulate how they differ from older, better-established social worlds, to argue that they have legitimacy as separate entities. The need for legitimation will be especially great when a social world risks being perceived as of marginal or of relatively low status. Establishing, awarding, and publicizing prizes are important legitimation processes. (14)

In short, we are interested in the way that awards do important work in African Studies to define and congeal the worlds of its scholarship. ASA alone boasts fifteen awards. We are not here to argue that 15 is too few nor too many, but rather to pose questions about what such awards are doing, and to ask if they might do more, or at least different, work.

Eyes on the Prize: Toward a Decolonization of Awards in African Studies In 1969, Nell Painter (herself a graduate student at the time) posed questions to President James Duffy at the ASA Annual Meetings in Montreal that resonated with broad and growing discontent with the racial composition and dynamics of African Studies: “Have members asked why there are so few black people in the Association? Has the Association taken meaningful steps towards changing the conditions which keep most black students from reaching a level where they might even know of the existence of the African Studies Association?” ³ Examining the structure, history, context, and perceived effects of the GSP Prize allows us the opportunity to revisit Painter’s pointed questions. Even in our conversation with the winners, a sense of unease about who this prize was speaking to, on behalf of, and the scope of its claims were clearly communicated by a number of prizewinners, even as they expressed tremendous gratitude and extolled the rewards of the GSP Prize for their own personal career trajectories.

An overarching concern that was raised in our conversation, was the extent to which the criteria for the GSP Prize entail a rather considerable degree of selection—that a graduate student is able to travel to the meeting (entailing both sufficient funds as well as relative proximity to the meeting); that the graduate student knows about the award and feels comfortable submitting; and that a faculty advisor is aware of the award, and is willing to nominate a work-in-progress. Indeed, a prize committee member acknowledged to us that the number of submissions in any given year is relatively low. That said, the scholars we spoke with noted that the recent virtual format of pandemic-era meetings has provided new opportunities for participation and collaboration from the African continent and attracted young scholars who might otherwise not have the funds to attend the annual meeting. Both the future of virtual presentations and their effects on the GSP Prize submission rates remain open questions.

It is important to note that despite its relatively short history, the institutional structure supporting the award has been dynamic, undergoing several changes in recent years to respond to ongoing conversations about equity, race, and decolonization in ASA. First, although it was the convention to include a U.S.-based African scholar on the GSP Prize selection committee, a recent policy change requires at least one Africa-based African scholar to serve on the committee. Second, the ASR editor has long served as a member of the committee, but that role was converted to a non-voting ex officio role in 2019, to moderate the role of the editor in the selection process and eliminate a possible bias toward rapid publishability versus other scholarly attributes. Third, criteria for the submitted paper were refined by requiring an article-length manuscript to be submitted. Prior to this shift, the pool of submitted papers might pit 15-minute talks against dissertation chapters against article manuscript drafts, with some forms more likely to be chosen than others. Finally, the guidelines of the GSP Prize were revised to acknowledge up to two runners-up in order to distribute recognition and its rewards more widely. Finally, while not a change to official GSP Prize policy, it is noteworthy that the ASR editor-in-chief and members of the Editorial Review Board have been conducting workshops with graduate students in a number of regional hubs on the continent to discuss manuscript preparation and paper prize submissions, and to generate more linkages between the journal and young scholars on the continent.

We laud these efforts, and in the spirit of these important recent revisions, we would like to propose some additional ideas for consideration based on ideas articulated in our conversation with past prizewinners. Specifically, we encourage ASA to:

1. 1. Either decouple the GSP Prize from conference participation altogether; OR require that submitted papers have been presented at one of a broader selection of conferences;

2. 2. Continue to engage in concerted efforts to recruit paper presentations and GSP Prize submissions from graduate students at HBCUs and Africa-based universities;

3. 3. Develop collaboration between ASA and multiple scholarly associations of the diaspora and the African continent (i.e. AHSA, ASWAD, CODESRIA, even former ASA prizewinners) to select and mentor a diverse group of young scholars through a paper presentation at an array of African Studies conferences, awards submission, and manuscript submission;

4. 4. Conduct interviews with the authors of the prize-winning papers that substantively engage the thematic contribution, theoretical implication, or boundaries of a field of study so that it has a more lasting effect on the field of African Studies;

5. 5. Encourage and/or incentivize student papers to be co-written with (or amongst) continentally based, African researchers and research assistants; and

6. 6. Institutionalize hybrid conferences to allow for both remote (and low-cost) participation as well as face-to-face meetings.

Such restructuring of the GSP Prize could constitute important steps toward Kessi, Marks, and Ramugondo’s 2020 call in the opening epigraph to “open the walls of our institutions physically and epistemically,” to make our contributions “sharper, more just, and infinitely more rigorous in understanding and shaping the world” (280). Finally, we end this introduction not with answers but with questions about the larger structure of awards in African Studies. What would it look like for awards to honor collaboration and not individuation? How can we continue to renovate awards to result not just in consecration, but in communication, amplification, and redistribution? And how can we build awards that augment and incentivize dialogue and connection, rather than disconnection and segmentation, between the worlds of African Studies?

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Footnotes

1. There were other winners of the ASA Graduate Student Paper Prize, but their papers were not published in the African Studies Review--and so they are not republished here. For a full list of Prize winners, see https://africanstudies.org/awards-prizes/graduate-student-paper-prize/graduate-student-paper-prize-winners/.

2. It is important to note that such memberships are neither mutually exclusive nor absolute in their effects on scholarly identity, as noted by AHSA founder and former ASA member, Prof. Shelby Lewis (2018).

3. Quoted in Allman, Jean 2019.

Articles included in this special issue are: