Master's Award Ceremony celebrates Michel Rouleau-Dick's achievement

The Finnish Society for Development Research and UniPID handed out the Master’s Award in Development Studies 2018 on 1 March 2019 in a ceremony organized in conjunction with the Development Days Conference, organized at the House of Science and Letters in Helsinki.

Photo: Ullamaija Kivikuru, Taimi Sitari and Michel Rouleau-Dick at the Master's Award in Development Studies 2018 award ceremony.

The Finnish Society for Development Research and UniPID handed out the Master’s Award in Development Studies 2018 on 1 March 2019 in a ceremony organized in conjunction with the Development Days Conference, organized at the House of Science and Letters in Helsinki.

Emeriti professors Ullamaija Kivikuru and Taimi Sitari represented the final selection committee at the event. Michel Rouleau-Dick attended the event to receive the recognition from the award committee in person. Kivikuru and Sitari praised the high standard of theses read by the final selection committee and discussed the difficulty of choosing theses to be awarded from a selection of such accomplished texts.

Michel Rouleau-Dick, the recipient of the Master’s Award, also delivered a short speech thanking all collaborators and offering some insights into the ideas outlined in his thesis.

In total, UniPID received 16 submissions to this year’s competition, representing eight Finnish universities. Disciplines ranged from education to collaborative and industrial design, peace and conflict research to corporate jurisprudence, and development studies to creative sustainability. The preliminary selection committee, consisting of Johanna Kivimäki, Teppo Eskelinen, Tiina Seppälä, Pertti Multanen and Lauri Siitonen chose six theses to forward to the final selection committee. Out of these six, the emeriti committee chose one to be granted the Master’s Award and two to be recognized with honorary mentions.

Click below to check out the theses recognized in the competition:

• Michel Rouleau-Dick: Statelessness, statehood and environmentally-displaced persons: the quest for a legal status on Alma, Åbo Akademis bibliotek och arkivsamlingar.
• Linda Sivander: Life with breaking water supply – boreholes and the governance of water in northern Uganda on HELDA – Digital Repository of the University of Helsinki.
• Erich Molz: Does Intercultural Competence Matter? New Perspectives on Relationship-Building in Unarmed Civilian Protection on Tampub, Tampere University International Repository.