The HPGRG is pleased to announce that the 2021 HPGRG Undergraduate Dissertation Prize has been awarded to Chiara Ruggieri-Mitchell for her dissertation titled “The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same: Trends in Conservation Focus, 2010-2019”. The dissertation, completed for a degree at Royal Holloway University, London (https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-teaching/departments-and-schools/geography/) provides a longitudinal in-depth analysis of the field of conservation studies publications.
Dr Emily Hayes (Oxford Brookes University), the HPGRG Awards officer and one of the assessing panel consisting of three HPGRG Committee members describes the thesis as:
“an amazingly diligently executed study of three leading anglophone conservation journals. The dissertation is a biogeographical study which investigates the locations of conservation studies, the animal subjects discussed, and the location and the genders of the authors of the articles published in these three journals over a nearly ten-year period. It forms the basis for many important historical and philosophical questions about conservation, research, publishing and geography.”
The dissertation was completed in difficult conditions because of the pandemic: Chiara was obliged to abandon her original plan of conducting practical field-work for this study of meta data analysis. The thesis is under embargo and therefore not downloadable from the HPGRG website at this point. However, we are delighted that Chiara has plans to publish her research. We will therefore update our site once the embargo is lifted or when the study’s findings are successfully published.