Lesley Green wins Humanities Book Award for "Rock | Water | Life"

Read the ASAAf Press Release:

The Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) is happy to announce its winners for the Humanities Book Prize Awards for 2023. These awards are made every year to honour the importance and contribution of scholarly texts to humanist knowledge production and intellectual endeavour in South Africa. 

Lesley Green wins ASSAf Humanities Book Award (Established Researcher Category)

Professor Lesley Green is awarded the 2023 ASSAf Humanities Book Award (category 'Established Researcher') for her book Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa (Duke University Press Books, 2020).

In Rock | Water | Life Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa. She asserts the need for environmental research and governance to transition to help address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation. Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over fracking in the Karoo; the call for the decolonisation of science; land restitution versus the politics of soil; contests over baboon management; and the politics of sewage. 

Lesley Green is a Professor of Anthropology and the Director of Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town. She has recently been awarded a US$4.4m grant by Science For Africa Foundation to develop a social science of the African Anthropocene in partnership with universities in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and the HSRC and Leeds University.

The Review Panel found the book to be a ground-breaking contribution to the environmental humanities in South Africa. 

Joint winners of the ASSAf Humanities Book Award in the category of 'Emerging Researcher' in 2023 are Dr B Camminga and Dr Dariusz Dziewanski for their books Transgender refugees and the imagined South Africa: Bodies over borders and borders over bodies, and Gang Entry and Exit in Cape Town: Getting Beyond the Streets in Africa's Deadliest City.  [...]

ASSAf awards these prizes bi-annually for scholarly publications that make outstanding and exemplary contributions to scholarship in the Humanities, Social Sciences or the Performing Arts. ASSAf received 49 nominations (31 for the Established Researcher category and 18 for the Emerging Researcher category), with the publication dates limited to 2019, 2020 and 2021. 

Two studies also received Honourable Mentions in the Established Researcher category: Louise Green Fragments from the History of Loss: The nature industry and the postcolony and Tina Steiner Convivial Worlds: Writing relation from Africa; and one in the Emerging Researcher category: Rick De Villiers Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation.

About the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf): ASSAf was inaugurated in May 1996. It was formed in response to the need for an Academy of Science consonant with the dawn of democracy in South Africa: activist in its mission of using science and scholarship for the benefit of society, with a mandate encompassing all scholarly disciplines that use an open-minded and evidence-based approach to build knowledge.

ASSAf thus adopted in its name the term 'science' in the singular as reflecting a common way of enquiring rather than an aggregation of different disciplines. Its Members are elected on the basis of a combination of two principal criteria, academic excellence and significant contributions to society.

The Parliament of South Africa passed the Academy of Science of South Africa Act (Act 67 of 2001), which came into force on 15 May 2002. This made ASSAf the only academy of science in South Africa officially recognised by government and representing the country in the international community of science academies and elsewhere.