The winner of the Sue Benson Prize for 2023 was Eleanor Burnett-Stuart (Christs College), for her dissertation Situating humans in the landscape in the Scottish rewilding movement. The two runners up were Inika Murkumbi with her dissertation Hearing and seeing things in urban, educated India and Cora Morris, whose dissertation Radical Jewish subjecthood, belonging, and the question of authenticity at a queer yeshiva school in East London is also co-winner of the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies' annual essay prize.
Eleanor commented on the experience of undertaking a dissertation, "In July 2022, I spent two weeks volunteering on a croft on the west coast of Scotland and conducting ethnographic fieldwork for my dissertation, which I planned to write on rewilding. During this time, on walks at dusk with my hosts and a fellow volunteer, we often saw deer on the ridge behind the croft and on the edges of the wood. By the time we saw them, they were usually already bounding away through the bracken. My hosts, in what is standard regenerative land management practice in Scotland, regularly arranged for the deer on their croft to be “culled” or “managed”; in their tool shed, they had a freezer-chest full of venison from the most recent of these culls.
I became interested in the practice of culling deer during my fieldwork and subsequent interviews because its seeming paradox seemed central to rewilding; how could a landscape be made wilder by humans killing animals, or by human intervention in general?
My dissertation centers on the idea that the deer cull works as a site of renegotiation of the categories of nature and culture. Rewilding begins from an assumption that many things which conventionally appear to be natural or wild, such as the treeless hillsides or the large herds of red deer, are in fact the result of human activity. The ‘kill ability’ of the deer, I thus argued, rested on their status in the eyes of the ecologists as being closer to culture than nature because of human cultivation led to their overpopulation; and therefore, they conceived of the cull as less destroying an element of the natural world as removing an out-of-scale element of the human world. Simultaneously, by killing the deer in an unsentimental mode, or in the words of my hosts, “[being] the predator”, the rewilders also resituated themselves within nature. I found that rewilders were undertaking dual projects of transformation, in which rewilders simultaneously attempted to disentangle nature and culture in the landscape, and to overcome ‘cultural’ sentimentality or traditions within themselves.
I am very grateful to have been awarded the Sue Benson Prize, and I thank both the Department at large and my Director of Studies Professor Susan Bayly for their support these three years. I would also like to thank my hosts at the croft for their generosity in welcoming me into such a remarkable place and sharing their ideas.
Finally, I would like to extend particular thanks to my dissertation supervisor Dr Rosie Jones McVey; the first ever essay I wrote in SAN1 was for her supervision on human-animal relations, and her warm enthusiasm and insight into all things interspecies carried me through this dissertation."