Jurors

The award will be determined five jury members: two permanent and three guest jurors.

Guest jurors are experts on the chosen competition topic and are selected by the EAC and the chairperson of the jury. They will be announced early in 2022.

Kristine Racina is the director of the Expatriate Archive Centre. Originally from Latvia, she is a self-described 'military brat' and has experience as an adult expatriate in Yemen, the Netherlands Antilles and the Netherlands. Kristine is an experienced consultant and manager of projects and teams in government roles in Latvia and Yemen, and a number of NGOs and local organisations in the Netherlands. She speaks multiple languages, including English, Latvian, Russian, Dutch and French. Kristine has managed a number of projects and events with significant budgets and stakeholders in each of the countries she has lived. She has two Master's degrees in Economics from University of Latvia and Financial Management from Centre Européen Universitaire de Nancy.

Click here to open Kristine Racina's profile on a new page

Jennifer McGarrigle is a researcher in the Centre of Geographical Studies (CEG) and an Assistant Professor of Human Geography in the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning (IGOT) at the Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal. She holds a PhD in Urban Studies from the University of Glasgow, UK. Her most recent publication is Dominguez-Mujica, J., McGarrigle, J. and Parreño, J.M (2021) International residential mobilities: From lifestyle migrations to tourism gentrification, published by Springer. Her current research focuses on new forms of international residential mobility and impacts in urban areas, with a particular focus on investment and lifestyle migration. She is coordinator of the IMISCOE research initiative 'PriMob: Privileged mobilites, local impacts, belonging and citizenship'.

Click here to open Jennifer McGarrigle's profile on a new page

Matthew Hayes is an Associate Professor at St. Thomas University and has been with the department of sociology since 2009. His PhD dissertation (York University 2008) looked at how certain ideas and values helped shape the technical organization of the economy in the 20th century, particularly through macroeconomics.

A few weeks after his dissertation defense, the stock market collapsed, and the so-called ‘Great Recession’ began. During this time, he became increasingly interested in how the relatively secure middle class in North America was being exposed to new and deeper forms of financial stress, and how cultural values and objective economic conditions increasingly diverged on issues such as labour, economic security, and urban and household forms. He is currently working on connecting this ethnographic work to broader theoretical reflections on the geographies of inequality in an individualist, market-oriented, post-welfare-state world.

Click here to open Matthew Hayes' profile on a new page

Meghann Ormond is an Associate Professor in Cultural Geography at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. As a cultural geographer, an immigrant who has lived all over the world, and an ardent fan of the transformative potential of international travel, she's deeply invested in and concerned with how differently-mobile people's roots, rights and vulnerabilities are recognised and accommodated in the places they visit and in which they live.

Click here to open Meghann Ormond's profile on a new page

The following guidelines apply to the jury:

• The jury has the right to not award the prizes if they judge the level and quality of the nominated theses in a specific year to be too low.
• There will not be any correspondence about decisions reached by the jury.
• For all other cases not described on this website, the EAC and the jury chairperson will decide.

The guest jurors of the 2021 Thesis Award were:

• Matthew Hayes: Matthew participated as a guest juror for the second time in 2021. Read his bio as a current guest juror above.

• Sarah Kunz: Sarah is a juror for the 2022 Thesis Award. Read her bio as a current guest juror above.

• Danau Tanu: an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda University, Japan. Being of mixed-heritage and having grown up internationally, her passion is to uncover the hidden voices of the children of serial migrants and others who grow up in the liminal space of the third culture. Her doctoral dissertation has become the first book on structural racism in international schools, Growing Up in Transit: The Politics of Belonging at an International School. Danau likes to claim that she speaks ‘3.5’ languages (English, Japanese, Indonesian and Chinese), and volunteers as Co-Chair of the Families in Global Transition (FIGT) Research Network. She is also a co-founder of the TCKs of Asia online forum and the Third Culture Stories podcast.

The guest jurors of the 2019 Thesis Award were:

• • Ruth Van Reken: a second-generation Third Culture Kid (TCK) and mother of three now adult TCKs. Her first grandchild is a Ghanaian born TCK. Ruth is co-author of Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, 3rd ed., and author of Letters Never Sent, her personal journaling written as she sought to understand the long-term impact of her cross-cultural childhood. Although she trained to be a registered nurse, for more than 30 years Ruth has traveled extensively to over 50 countries speaking about issues related to global family lifestyles. Currently, she is seeking to understand how lessons learned from the TCK experience can transfer to better understanding those she now calls cross-cultural kids (CCKs), children raised among many cultural worlds for all sort of reasons. She is co-founder and past chairperson of the annual Families in Global Transition conference.  In addition to her two books, she has written, a chapter in Strangers at Home, Unrooted Childhoods, and Writing Out of Limbo plus various other writings.

• Matthew Hayes: Matthew participated as a guest juror for the first time in 2021. Read his bio as a current guest juror above.

   

• Aniek Smit: a historian of migration. She wrote a dissertation on the expatriate communities of The Hague and Jakarta in the postwar period at Leiden University and published on labor migration, career migration and international women’s clubs. She taught various topics in History and European Union Studies at Leiden University and Erasmus University Rotterdam. She currently works as a project employee for the Belgian heritage organization “Het Vredescentrum van de Provincie en de Stad Antwerpen vzw” and prepared an exhibition about the liberation of Antwerp after the Second World War.