Yvonne Braun Receives Enloe Award

Yvonne Braun with friend and research assistant Ntsoaki Mokose.

Lesotho, a small, resource-poor country surrounded by the Republic of South Africa, is in the midst of one of the largest dam development projects in the world—and tens of thousands of Basotho people are being affected by it.

University of Oregon faculty member Yvonne A. Braun has been documenting the effects on the Basotho people since 1997 and writes about her CSWS-supported research in the latest issue of the CSWS Annual Review. On September 23, Braun was notified of her selection as the inaugural winner of the Enloe Award for her essay “Left High and Dry: An Intersectional Analysis of Gender, Dams and Development in Lesotho.”

An assistant professor in the departments of women’s and gender studies and international studies as well as an affiliate faculty member of the Center for the Study of Women in Society, Braun will receive an honorarium and her paper will be published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics as the Enloe Award Essay.

Named in honor of Cynthia Enloe’s pioneering feminist research in international politics and political economy, and her considerable contribution to building a more inclusive feminist scholarly community, the Enloe Award is given in recognition of exceptional quality in a paper submitted to IFjP by an emergent scholar.

Braun credits the revision process she went through after attending the CSWS intensive Writing and Promotion Workshop held at the end of spring term 2010 as helping her win the award.