Ciriacy-Wantrup postdoctoral fellow wins geography's top early career paper prize

March 15, 2022
Hilary Faxon headshot

Congratulations to Environmental Science, Policy, and Management postdoctoral fellow Dr. Hilary Faxon on being named winner of the 2022 J. Warren Nystrom Award by the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Considered the top early career prize in the field of geography, the award recognizes the best paper based on a recent dissertation in geography and was presented during last week’s AAG Annual Meeting. 

Faxon’s paper, “Welcome to the Digital Village: networking geographies of agrarian change,” brings together agrarian studies and digital geography to advance the concept of the digital village, a networked social space in which online practices emerge from existing agrarian relations to reconfigure the strategies of economic survival, the landscapes of home, and the tactics of politics. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Myanmar, Faxon shows how farmers incorporate Facebook into daily efforts to secure livelihoods, support communities, and mobilize in struggles over land. The paper is forthcoming at Annals of the American Association of Geographers, the discipline’s flagship journal.

The paper forms one part of Faxon’s larger project on the political ecologies of digitization, which she has been developing at UC Berkeley with the support of a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship. In addition to her research, Faxon is completing a book manuscript based on her dissertation fieldwork, tentatively titled, Surviving the State: Struggles for Land and Democracy in Myanmar. 

Faxon is a member of UC Berkeley’s Land Lab, directed by pioneering political ecology Professor Nancy Lee Peluso. Peluso was recently recognized with the 2022 Distinguished Career Award from AAG’s Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group for her major research contributions to political ecology, as well as her training and mentorship in the field.

Learn more about Faxon's background and research in this profile from Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.