The Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand Studies Network (ACNZSN) is extremely pleased to announce that the winner of the 2023 Donna Coates Book Prize is Alexandra Roginski’s Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)! 🙂

The international adjudication committee all enjoyed reading Alexandra’s book and collectively expressed their thoughts on it with the following:

Roginski’s work combines the reconstruction of the careers and lives of pseudoscientists with a diverse set of themes relating to settler-colonialism, including race, gender, science, identity, and power. This approach highlighted the strength of story-telling and narrative as a tool with which to open up broad thematic issues, bringing together the human story with the societal dynamics that shaped and were themselves influenced by this phenomenon of phrenology. The way that phrenology was utilised as a window through which so many aspects of life in the Tasman World in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century could be explored makes this a fitting winner of the 2023 prize.

Alongside her book being promoted on ACNZSN’s website and social media platforms, Alexandra will also be receiving GBP150.

Warmest congratulations to Alexandra! 🙂

However, the decision on the winner for the prize was extremely close and the international adjudication committee was also very impressed with the runner up for the prize: Pavithra Jayawardena’s Immigrants’ Citizenship Perceptions: Sri Lankan Migrants in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2023).

And so they also wanted to express their shared thoughts on her excellent book with the following:

This was a particularly difficult decision on the book prize this year due to the very high quality of the submissions. Jayawardena delivered a compelling case study on Sri Lankan migrants in Australia and New Zealand, with real world implications for policy-making in an ongoing and often fraught debate about approaches to immigration in many countries. The book was notable for its strong theoretical framework, the richness of the research methodology and the resulting qualitative source material, and its conclusion which can serve to shape and sharpen some existing theoretical understandings of the relationship between migrants and citizenship. The argument was compelling and the work establishes a platform for future research into migrant perspectives on citizenship.

Congratulations to Pavithra as well! 🙂

Dr. Jatinder Mann

Creator and Manager of ACNZSN

Administrator, Donna Coates Book Prize International Adjudication Committee