Baptista Prizewinning Essays
2023 Winners
GRADUATE: Amanda Gooden,“Mi no chrii ina dat!”: Language Play, Heteronormativity and Linguistic Innovation in Jamaica
GRADUATE: Nastassia Pratt, Placemaking as a Public Space Planning Tool in New Providence, Bahamas
UNDERGRADUATE: Callum Lawlor, The Earth Bled Poison from Her Opened Veins: The Rise and Fall of the Mining Industry in El Salvador
2022 Winners
GRADUATE: Debbie Ebanks-Schlums, Rhythms and Currents: Black Caribbean Film and Counter-Signifying Practices
GRADUATE: Luah Batina Tomas, A Study of Right-Wing Women in Latin America
UNDERGRADUATE: Natasha Sarazin, Brazilian Auto Workers and Labour Militancy: Observing the Crisis of Capitalism From the 1920s to the Present
2021 Winners
GRADUATE: Amber Williams-King, When Palm Trees Break: the Fractured Horizons of Black Caribbean World-Making in the Midst of Crisis
GRADUATE: Rachel Lobo, “A Willingness to Dig”: Autonomous Feminist Struggles and Care Work
2020 Winners
GRADUATE: Giovanni Carranza-Hernandez, Hemispheric racial formations: Making sense of Central and South Americans’ experience of race and ethnicity in Toronto, Canada
UNDERGRADUATE: Enzo Flores Montoya, Lo fantasmagórico en Pedro Paramo y la metamorfosis en Silver: Una critica Marxista de la modernidad y del progreso
2019 Winner
GRADUATE: Kimberly Palmer, A Geography of Resistance and Recuperation: A Global Defense of Garifuna Place
2018 Winner
UNDERGRADUATE: Laura Perez, Values of Sustainability. A Case Study of Environmental Development and Growth in Costa Rica and Brazil
2017 Winners
GRADUATE: Hannah Rackow, Clothing as Remains: Performance After Atrocity
GRADUATE Honorable Mention: Carmen Umana-Kinitzki, Water is Life: Embodied Encounters and Local Values of the Río Peñas Blancas in Response to Potential Hydroelectric Dam Development in South-Pacific Costa Rica
UNDERGRADUATE: Carlos Handy Charles, Transnational Social Field: A framework to Analyze National Identity and the Haitian State’s Cultural Politics of Belonging in the Haitian Diaspora
2016 Winners
GRADUATE: Alyssa James, Ambivalent Resistance. Gender, mobility, and Haiti's itinerant market women
GRADUATE: Josh Mentanko, The fluttering gait and the powder puff are unheard of here": Gay Travel to Revolutionary Mexico
GRADUATE Honorable Mention: Ciann Wilson, Beyond the Colonial Divide: African Diasporic and Indigenous Youth Alliance Building for HIV Prevention
UNDERGRADUATE: Elise Dueck, The La Platosa Conflict
UNDERGRADUATE Honorable Mention: Camila Acosta Varela, 'Decolonizing the nation-state': Indigenous Autonomy, Extractivism, and Consultation in Contemporary Bolivia
2015 Winners
GRADUATE: John Laman, Revisiting the Sanctuary City: Citizenship or Abjection? Spotlighting the Case of Toronto
UNDERGRADUATE: Jahkeil Goldson, The Project of Modemity: Epistemic Violence and its Relationship with Essentialism and Hegemony
UNDERGRADUATE: Fred Daou, Hybridity: A High Breed of Antiimperialism Politics
2014 Winners
GRADUATE: Nadia Halum Arauz, Atahualpa's Legacy: Analyzing the Impact of Good Mining on Peru's Campesino Community
GRADUATE: Jenna Meguid, Colombia's Peace Talks
UNDERGRADUATE: Jorge Villatoro, The Emergence of the Regional Cult of El Señor de Esquipulas
2013 Winners
GRADUATE: Priya Chendke, My Peruvian Museum
GRADUATE: Terrine Friday, Copyright Economy: Protecting works of Mas in Trinidad and Tobago's Culture Industry
UNDERGRADUATE: Nabila Islam, Subject Making and Resistance in the Amazon: 16th to 20th Century
2012 Winners
GRADUATE: Lisane Thirsk, Law and The Discursive Construction of Street Harassment as Violence in Mexico City
UNDERGRADUATE HONORABLE MENTION: Katia Hoyos Saleme, The Pawns in the Globalization Game
UNDERGRADUATE HONORABLE MENTION: Allan Jacobson Spessoto, Recuperated Workplaces
2011 Winners
GRADUATE: Charis Kamphuis, Foreign Investment and the Privatization of Coercion: A Case Study of the Forza Security Company in Peru
GRADUATE: Caren Weisbart, Beyond Recogniton: Alternative Rights-Realizing Strategies in the Northern Quiche Region of Guatemala
UNDERGRADUATE: Rolando Aguilera, Impunity on Trial: the Case for Repealing El Salvador's Amnesty Law
2010 Winners
GRADUATE: Priscila Becker, The Convention on Biological Diversity, Indigenous Peoples and Conservation of Biodiversity
UNDERGRADUATE: Margaret Bancerz, Counter-Hegemony and ALBA: The Answer to the FTAA
2009 Winners
GRADUATE: Laurence Robitaille, Understanding Capoeira through Cultural Theories of the Body
UNDERGRADUATE: Emmanuelle Fick, The Body, the Stage, and the Theory: Unpacking the Body in Aime Cesaire's ‘The Tragedy of King Christophe’
2008 Winners
GRADUATE: Nicholas Balaisis, The Publicness of Melodrama in the Cuban Special Period
UNDERGRADUATE: Laura Landertinger, Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (MST)
2007 Winners
GRADUATE: Talia Wooldridge, Cuban Raperas: A Feminist Revolution within the Revolution
UNDERGRADUATE: Kate Sheese, Contesting Victimhood: Indigenous Women and Violence in Chiapas, Mexico
2006 Winners
GRADUATE: Jasmin Hristov, Visibilizing and Humanizing Indigenous Peasant Movements: The Case of the CRIC in Colombia
GRADUATE HONOURABLE MENTION: Marcelo Vieta, The Worker-Recovered Enterprises Movement in Argentina
UNDERGRADUATE: Jillian Ollivierre, Sex on the Beach: Hypersexuality, ‘Making Do,’ and Sexual Health in the Anglophone Caribbean
2005 Winners
GRADUATE: Gena Chang-Campbell, 'Y/O' Mestizaje as Foil and Fetish of Postcolonial Consciousness
UNDERGRADUATE: Fabiola Rios, Filling the Gap: The Colonial Project and the Goddess
2004 Winners
GRADUATE: Jennifer Costanza, Elusive Hegemony: A Critical Analysis of United States Policy towards Haiti
UNDERGRADUATE: Kathryn Grimbly, Caribbean Visual Arts in the Era of Post-Modernism
2003 Winners
GRADUATE: Aaron K. Kamugisha, Reading Said and Wynter on Liberation and the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition
UNDERGRADUATE: Jillian Di Nallo, A Great Mistake to Go By Looks”: Overcoming Stereotypes in Caribbean Literature
2002 Winners
GRADUATE: Scott Pearce, Fueling War: The Impact of Canadian Oil Investment on the Conflict in Colombia
UNDERGRADUATE: Jasmin Hristov, Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism in Argentina: Unrevealed Connections
2001 Winners
GRADUATE: Frank Scherer, Chinese Shadows: Fernando Ortiz on Race and Cubanity
UNDERGRADUATE: Megan Rivers-Moore, The Myth of Racial Equality: Contesting the Discourse of National Identity in Cuba
2000 Winners
GRADUATE: Juan Gabriel Ronderos: The War on Drugs, Its Military Perspective and Its Consequences for Latin America: The Case of Colombia
1999 Winners
GRADUATE: Hendrick Van Harten, The Olive Branch or the Straight Jacket? Guatemala's Peace Accords in a Free Trade Area of the Americas
UNDERGRADUATE: Chris Pennington, In the Absence of God: French Catholicism, English Protestantism, and the Welfare of the Plantation Slaves in the 17th and 18th Century Caribbean
1998 Winners
GRADUATE: D. Garcia, The Protection of Creditors Under a New Jamaican Companies Act
UNDERGRADUATE: Demitry Papasotiriou, Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune? The Latin American Debt Crisis