St Antony’s students win MPhil in Development Studies prizes

Loïs Toumieux and Tegan Hadisi, both students of St Antony’s College, have won the Papiya Ghosh Thesis Prize and Examiners prize respectively.

Loïs Toumieux’s thesis investigated the socio-environmental impacts of a nickel mine’s Biodiversity Offset (BO) pilot in Eastern Madagascar. By drawing on interviews with key stakeholders involved in the pilot, it went beyond examining BO as a purely technical conservation mechanism and instead looked at how BO is a deeply human project that depends upon reshaping local behaviours.

The Papiya Ghosh Prize is awarded annually to a student for the best MPhil Dissertation in Development Studies. It was established in memory of Papiya Ghosh, a historian of Southeast Asia.

Tegan Hadisi’s thesis looked at how authoritarian regimes leverage massive infrastructure projects to bolster their legitimacy. Focusing on the infrastructure project The Line in Saudi Arabia, it examined how such developments are deeply entangled with political power and the justification of centralised authoritarian governance.

Tegan is currently writing a co-authored book, ‘Migrant TikTok: The Struggle for Digital Power’, and hopes to build on her MPhil research in the future.