This year the Award Committee received 78 books to consider for the prize and shortlisted 5 works for the 2021 prize. Books were evaluated for their scholarly brilliance, their overall contribution to the field of Science and Technology Studies, and their relevance to public debate and social change.
The 2021 Rachel Carson Prize was awarded to Laura Watts, for Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga (MIT Press, 2019).
From the Prize citation:
Watts’ book offers an engaging, subtle and inspiring ethnography of energy practices and ecologies on Orkney. Her careful, imaginative accounts cunningly expand the time frames of eco-political transformation, thereby enabling unexpected capacities for action and forms of relevance to come to the surface. Presenting a sophisticated combination of empirical vignettes, speculative fiction, conceptual writing, poetry and photography, her Island Saga intertwines detailed descriptions, intimate narrative and fables of an alternative energy future. Adopting a methodology of dwelling in place, her work tells the stories of frequently overlooked people and places, painting lively portraits of forgotten ecologies, environments and infrastructures that still too often go unnoticed.
Because the volume of books to review has become unmanageable, as they are often submitted for the Fleck Prize and the Carson Prize, committee members continued the work of the last year’s committee and presented Council with a proposal to change the nomination process and a new language to better distinguish between the two prizes. From now on “nominations may be made only by current 4S members and those who have held membership over the last three years. Self nominations are welcome. A book may not be nominated to both the Fleck and Carson Prizes in the same year. Members may nominate only one book per prize.”
The 2021 Carson Prize Committee was María Belén Albornoz (Chair, Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Ecuador), Aalok Khandekar (IIT Hyderabad, India), Noortje Marres (University of Warwick, UK), Hsin-Hsing Chen (Shih-Hsin University, Taiwan).
