And the winners of the 2021 EGSH PhD Excellence Awards are...

Yesterday we hosted our annual award ceremony.
The ceremony took place in a hybrid form and was attended by over 30 people in the Senaatszaal and about 20 people joined online.
We were honoured to have dr. Emiel Rijshouwer as a guest speaker about speculative design methods in research in the fields of Social Sciences and Humanities, and Sanne Allers to introduce the EGSH PhD Council and its activities.
We were lucky to get a lot of strong submissions for our awards this year and we would like to take this opportunity to thank all who submitted. We deeply appreciate your efforts and we encourage you all to enter again next year and look forward to your submission(s).
With special thanks to our host prof. dr. Liesbet van Zoonen and the award presenters prof. dr. Inge Hutter, dr. Fadi Hirzalla, Marjolijn Heerings and Miranda Lutz-Landesbergen we hereby present to you the nominees and winners!
Warm regards,
The EGSH team


The nominees for the Best Thesis Award 2021:
- Jacqueline Wong for her thesis 'Enhancing Self-Regulated Learning through Instructional Supports and Learning Analytics in Online Higher Education’
- Carolina Dalla Chiesa for her thesis 'Crowdfunding culture, bridging arts and commerce'

And the award for Best Thesis 2021 goes to both Jacqueline Wong and Carolina Dalla Chiesa!
We could hardly make a choice between these two candidates, as both of them produced more than excellent work. Jacqueline Wong was awarded a cum laude by her assessment committee and used a mixture of methods mainly within the pedagogy discipline. The work of Carolina Dalla Chiesa on the other hand is both interdisciplinary as a unique combination of cultural and economic studies, and uses a mixture of methods as well. We asked for advice from the supervisors but that didn’t help much either, as they were both equally praising the two works. We looked back at how we handled such a dilemma in the past and found that in 2015 we had a similar situation, and back then we decided to award both PhDs the recognition for excellence. So that is what we have done this year too: the awards go to Jacqueline and Carolina together!
Congratulations, Jacqueline and Carolina!
The nominees for the Best Article Award 2021:
- Chiara Carboni - Conceptualizing the digitalization of healthcare work: A metaphor-based Critical Interpretive Synthesis. Published in Sociology and Health.
- Carolina Dalla Chiesa - Crowdfunding artists. Published in Socio-Economic Review
- Kayla Green - Mood and emotional reactivity of adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Published in Scientific Reports, 11.
- Josje ten Kate - Following your gut" or "questioning the scientific evidence": Understanding vaccine scepticism among more-educated Dutch parents. Published in Journal of Health and Social Behaviour.

The award for Best Article 2021 goes to Chiara Carboni!
The award goes to Chiara Carboni. Chiara, congratulations on exceptional and successful effort to combine medicine, science and technology studies and sociology, to understand the digitization of health care. As you say, digitization of health care has been studied from many different perspectives but it is complex and difficult to bring these perspectives together into a comprehensive framework. You have done this successfully by integrating the outcomes of a series of studies through cognitive metaphors particularly slime molds to capture networks; scripts and stagehands to describe hierarchies and invisible work; and river engineering to understand workflows. We thought this was intellectually immensely challenging and brave, and we are impressed by the depth of the outcomes and the impact this will have on very different disciplines.
Congratulations, Chiara!
The nominees for the Best Conference Paper award 2021:
- Vincent Baptist for his paper Criminal, cosmopolitan, commodified: how Rotterdam’s interwar amusement street became a safe mirror image of itself, presented at the international conference Cultural Perceptions of Safety.
- Rick Everts for his paper Licensed to Rock, how higher music education creates professional musicians, presented at the Annual Conference of the European Sociological Association.
- Sabrina Rahmawan Huizinga for her paper Governing the resilient city, an empirical analysis of governing techniques, presented at the Relational Resilience Conference.

The award for Best Conference Paper 2021 goes to Vincent Baptist!
Vincent, your paper about the pre-war Schiedamse Dijk in Rotterdam is a perfect example of how the study of one street requires not only mastery of historical archives, but also an understanding of urban planning, sociology and philosophy. You have combined these excellently to assess the different meanings of Schiedamsedijk through time, moving from a street that was as famous as the German Reeperbahn, to a rather sanitized commercial “pleasure scape”, in what you call a safe mirror image of itself. As a result, the paper is not only a rich contribution to local Rotterdam history but also an important addition to our interdisciplinary understanding of wider urban processes.
Congratulations, Vincent!

The award for Best Poster 2021 goes to Ilse van de Groep!
There were relatively few submissions in this category, only five. It is likely that this was due to the COVID-crisis making live conferences almost impossible. The submissions were nicely divided across our discipline with one each from sociology, philosophy, psychology, socio-medical sciences and pedagogy. Our winning poster is the one of Ilse van der Groep, of the Erasmus Sync Lab, about Resisting Aggression in Social Context.
We like the balanced articulation of form and content, the effective usage of colour and icons, and the way these guide the reader through the research outcomes.
Congratulations, Ilse!

The award for Best Societal Impact 2021 goes to Joris Krijger and Tamara Thuis
It is rewarding to see how individual PhD candidates or larger research groups are becoming more and more oriented on achieving positive societal impact with their research. It is in their work that we see the Erasmus slogans becoming operational and effective. We had six submissions for the impact category, pertaining to media coverage, consultancy and advisory work. The initiative that we have awarded concerns a successful attempt to enhance the social responsibility and practices of large institutions and corporations in the way they handle their data and algorithms. It was inspired by what we know in Dutch as the Toeslagenaffaire, in which the Dutch Tax Office harassed recipients of benefits for years based on racist algorithms and tax officers. Two PhD candidates, Joris Krijger of the Erasmus School of Philosophy and Tamara Thuis of the Rotterdam School of Management took an initiative to prevent such abuse to repeat itself in the future.
Congratulations, Joris and Tamara!
The nominees for the Best PhD Colleague Award 2021 are:
- Lysbert Zeinstra
- Alke Dias Broens
- Emiliy Tang
- Savanah Boele
- Luciana Dos Santos Duarte

The award for Best PhD Colleague 2021 goes to Luciana Dos Santos Duarte!
Luciana is the coordinator of the PhD council at the International Institute of Social studies. She lobbied strongly to secure teaching training opportunities for our PhDsd at the ISS, even though Luciana did not need that opportunity herself. She also regularly shares her experiences as a foreigner in the Netherlands to help other colleagues. A recent one was about her experiences in going through the Dutch labour market as a non-Dutch. Remarkably, Luciana shared all the documents she used in the application process for the benefit of other colleagues. This makes her stand out!
Thank you, Luciana!
The nominees for the Best PhD Supervisor 2021 are:
- Annemiek Harder
- Daphne van de Bongardt
- Eveline Crone
- Hedwig Blommestein
- Hester van de Bovenkamp
- Karin Astrid Siegmann
- Lieke Oldenhof
- Loes Keijsers
- Marieke Meeuwisse
- Martina Buljac
- Martine Baars
- Payal Arora
- Rik Wehrens
- Wil Hout
We are proud at EGSH that you are part of our community and that you are setting an example to your colleagues how to supervise. Your PhDs say you bring time, effort and enthusiasm to the table; they say you create a warm and supportive environment for them; they recognise that you help them with your extensive networks; and, very importantly, they deeply appreciate how you support them in times of personal hardship and give them time to recover.

The award for Best PhD Supervisor 2021 goes to Hester van de Bovenkamp!
According to her PhD candidates Hester gives them freedom and encouragement to follow their own PhD-path; she strikes a perfect balance between professional encouragement and reducing stress levels; she seems to be very good at ‘making big things small’, and when the PhD research seems to overwhelm her PhDs, she cuts up tasks in small pieces so that they become more manageable. The PhD candidates feel she genuinely cares about them, by spending quality time with them beyond supervision meetings. They conclude by saying that her disposition ‘to care’ is the bedrock that makes her the greatest supervisor!
Thank you, Hester!

The award for Best EGSH Teacher 2021 goes to the ISS team of Thea Hilhorst, Linda Johnson and Rodrigo Mena!
The choice for best teacher this year was relatively straightforward, as one of the teaching teams stood out in terms of subject importance, course evaluation and teacher performance.
The teaching team received a solid five out of five evaluation points from the participating students. One quote nicely summarizes the overall appreciation of the teaching:
Firstly, the teachers are very professional, the lecturers are very experienced in the field and there are many vivid cases in the class. Secondly, the course content is very practical, the section on internet security left a very deep impression on me and filled in the gaps in my knowledge. Finally the teacher was very humorous and interacted a lot with the students, which made the atmosphere of the class relaxed and interesting. All in all, it was a great class.
Thank you, Thea, Linda and Rod!