PhD candidate Alyssa Paredes awarded the Christine Wilson Prize and the Robert M. Netting Prize

November 1, 2018

Alyssa Paredes, PhD candidate in Anthropology, was recently awarded the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition’s 2018 Christine Wilson Graduate Student Paper Prize for her piece, “Follow the Yellow Brix Road: How the Japanese Market’s Taste for Sweetness Transformed the Philippine Highlands.” The award is for “outstanding graduate student research papers that examine topics within the perspectives of nutrition, food studies, and anthropology.”

Another paper, entitled “Fusarium is a Grace from God! Scientific, Divine, and Microbial Collaboration in the Philippine ‘Bananapocalypse,’” also won the 2018 Robert M. Netting Best Graduate Student Paper Prize from the Culture & Agriculture, a section of the American Anthropological Association. The Netting Prize is awarded  “for original research related to livelihoods based on crop, livestock, or fishery production and forestry and/or management of agricultural and environmental resources.”

Both pieces are part of her dissertation on externalized costs and boundless value in the making of a highly politicized and prototypically “cheap” commodity, the banana. The award presentations will be made at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose, CA, November 14 to 19, 2018.