Bernstein & Byres Prize 2023
We are pleased to announce that Yu Huang of the School of Ethnology and Sociology at Minzu University of China, Beijing, has been awarded the 2023 Bernstein and Byres Prize for her article ‘“Keep a sinking boat afloat”: Class contradictions in a nascent shrimp farmers’ cooperative in South China’, Journal of Agrarian Change 23(2): 286-306.
The Bernstein & Byres Prize has been awarded since 2008 by the Journal of Agrarian Change (JAC) to the best article published in that year. An award of £500 is given to the winner (donated by our publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd). Articles are judged on: (a) their quality as works of political economy; (b) their analytical power; (c) their originality; and (d) the quality of evidence presented and its deployment. Through this, we hope to reinforce the remit of the Journal in the field of agrarian political economy and to encourage scholarly work investigating the social relations and dynamics of production, property and power in agrarian formations and their processes of change, both historical and contemporary.
For the prize for 2023, a jury of five were asked to assess three articles shortlisted by the Journal’s editors. The other articles included on the shortlist were, in alphabetical order:
Part of the Special Issue on Populism, Agrarian Movements and Progressive Politics, Aftab and Ali’s article provides a rich analysis of the dynamics of contemporary Pakistani farmers’ organisations and their internal tensions.
Shozab Raza’s article addresses questions of empire, race and decoloniality through a historical analysis of western Pakistan.
Yu Huang is the final winner. Her article analyses how class dynamics played out in the history of a shrimp farmers’ cooperative in southern China. Writing from the perspective of an ‘engaged anthropologist’ who was actively involved in the cooperative, she, in the words of one of the jurors, ‘begins from the Marxist debates around the role and potential of cooperatives within a capitalist system –– and then goes on to understand the “contradictions between capital and labour” and the exploitative nature of capital…hidden behind the cooperative form’. These are explored through discussion of the cooperative’s relationship with agribusinesses, and relations between its members and hired workers.
Yu Huang’s article is nuanced and detailed while remaining clearly linked to broader processes of change. In other words she succeeds in moving between the abstract and the concrete in an incisive and compelling way. Without losing sight of what cooperatives might achieve, she makes the important point that ‘a pro-poor cooperative movement needs to incorporate a class-analysis’ to make possible a ‘dialectical synthesis of theory and practice oriented towards transforming social relations’.
The five jury members – three former editors and two current members of the International Advisory Board – produced detailed reportts for which the editorial team are immensely grateful.
The editors of JAC would like to congratulate Yu Huang on her notable achievement. The Journal of Agrarian Change looks forward to welcoming submissions that engage in intellectually ambitious and empirically rigorous work in agrarian political economy.
