Announcing the winner of the 2025 SAE-CES pre-dissertation award

The SAE is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2025 SAE-CES pre-dissertation award is Marika Krishnan of UCLA. This annual award provides $5000 support for doing short-term pre-dissertation fieldwork in the social-cultural anthropology of contemporary Europe, as well as a CES conference attendance grant and other forms of early career support. 

Marika Krishnan’s research project “Negotiating School Exclusions: Discourse, Ideology, and Social Action in East London’s Education Coalitions” will focus on exclusionary practices in the UK schools. Marika Krishnan argues that punitive disciplinary measures, such as suspension and exclusion, increasingly define European schools resulting in educational disenfranchisement and alienation, disproportionately affecting marginalized urban youth. While in London she will explore how grassroots community coalitions challenge school exclusion. Her project is significant both for understanding the practices of exclusion and self-exclusion as well as for developing pedagogic strategies to draw young people into schooling. Her study will bring three different stakeholders (educators, youth, and families) together to work jointly to address the suspension and exclusion crisis. It will also contribute important insights into youth agency as a positive force for social and educational transformation. Congratulations to Marika Krishnan!