Congratulations Philip Van Huizen - Winner of the Prize for the best PhD Dissertation in Canadian Studies

Van Huizen, Philip. Flooding the Border: Development, Politics and Environmental Controversy in the Canadian-US. Skagit Valley awarded the CSN-RÉC Prize for the best PhD Dissertation in the Canadian Studies.

The Canadian Studies Network – Réseau d'études canadiennes is pleased to announce the winner of the 2014 Prize for the best PhD Dissertation in the Canadian Studies: Philip Van Huizen’s Flooding the Border: Development, Politics and Environmental Controversy in the Canadian-US. Skagit Valley, University of British Columbia, 2013.

This prize is awarded annually to an outstanding interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation completed at a Canadian university on a Canadian subject that best advances our knowledge and understanding of Canada and Canadian Studies, and is defended during the preceding calendar year. The CSN-RÉC has nominated Dr. Van Huizen’s thesis for the Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis in Canadian Studies offered by the International Council for Canadian Studies.

The dissertation explores the place of environmental conflicts in the relationship between Canada and the United States, and demonstrates that we need to pay greater attention to resource and environmental issues as part of North American diplomacy in the twentieth century. The mandate for resource development has undergirded much of the country’s evolution. Van Huizen finds that both advocates of industrial development and the environmentalist response subscribed to a fundamentally similar notion of the modern liberal state: that the politics of development and the politics of preservation are rather closer than we often think. “Flooding the Border” depicts Canada as a project of active negotiation: with our neighboring nation-state, with the natural world, and between ourselves. (quoted from the Committee`s recommendation)

Previous winners of this prize have been:

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Samantha Burton, "Canadian girls in London: negotiating home and away in the British World at the turn of the century"(McGill University, 2012)

Jaime Yard, “Working Natures: An Ethnography of Love, Labour, and Accumulation on the British Columbian Coast” (York University, 2012)