The Diana Forsythe Prize was created in 1998 to celebrate the best book or series of published articles in the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. The prize is awarded annually at the AAA meeting by a committee consisting of one representative from the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) and two from CASTAC. It is supported by the General Anthropology Division (GAD) and Bern Shen.
2026 Diana Forsythe Prize Winner
Winner: V. Chitra, Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai’s Shore (2024, Cornell University Press)
This beautiful and methodologically innovative ethnography of Mumbai’s urban coastlines examines technoscientific histories of mapping urban regions and ecologies. The author’s long-term commitment to coastal Mumbai’s people and ecologies emerges in the rich data and depictions of life in Mumbai—especially the idiosyncrasies of work, humor of everyday life, linguistic play, non-human intimacies, and power plays that comprise everyday life. Over several years, V. Chitra follows and works alongside planners, scientists, designers, and environmental experts involved in mapping and remaking the litoral. This is an engaging ethnography of how environmental space is made through practices and tools of planning, scientific monitoring, and cartography—V. Chitra uses their own drawings, beautifully, as a pillar of their analysis of drawings as a technoscientific tool of expertise.
Mumbai’s coastal fishers/navigators Koli community emerges as key protagonists as they navigate both the sea as well as the urban development politics that frame their access to land and livelihood. V. Chitra balances working with the communities of experts tasked to rezone the coast as well as the communities most affected by these transformations. This is a skilled use of feminist science and technology approaches, theories, and methods to examine the multiple epistemologies and ontologies of urban coastal space in transformation. It succeeds in being an ethnography of both planning tools and planners, as well as the people, non-human subjects, and environments reshaped by urban expansion.
The book depicts the murkiness of mapping the complex and co-dependent lives navigating the unbounded space at the edge of both land and sea; municipal workers, scientists, anthropologists, crows, crabs, plastic bottles, and tin roofs join the multispecies and material combinations drawn together by the author, in the literal and metaphorical sense. Writing and drawing, as forms of representation and theory, intertwine and produce analytical depth. The jury recognizes that this is not as effortless and simple as it is made to appear and comes to fruition through the author’s in-depth knowledge and impressive skills in the representational, creative, and analytical strategies of both ethnographic writing and very deliberate graphic novel-inspired drawing.
2026 Call for Nominations for the Diana Forsythe Prize
Please spread the word far and wide that the Diana Forsythe Prize committee is now accepting nominations for the Diana Forsythe Prize, due no later than June 1, 2026 (early nominations are appreciated). Self-nominations are welcomed.
Submission Requirements
- To be eligible, books (or article series) must have been published in the last five years (copyright of 2021 or later).
- Formal letter of nomination outlining how the book (or article series) exemplifies the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. (Self-nominations are welcomed.)
- Three physical copies of the book (or article series) must be mailed to the selection committee members.
Nomination Procedure
Note: This nomination procedure is required to be considered. Publishers, formal nomination letters are required for each book nominated.
- Complete the online submission form and upload the formal letter of nomination to the form by June 1, 2026 (11:59 PM CDT).
- Once the nomination has been submitted and verified as meeting minimum requirements, the publisher/nominee will be provided with the correct addresses to send copies of the book (or article series) to each committee member within 2-3 business days.
- Mail one copy of the book (or article series) to each committee member, postmarked by June 10, 2026 or immediately upon receipt of addresses.
Previous Winners
2025 Emily Yates-Doerr, Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm (2025, University of California Press)
2024 Duana Fullwiley, Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (University of California Press, 2024)
2023 Bettina Stoetzer, Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2022)
2022 Adriana Petryna, Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change (Princeton University Press, 2022); Noah Tamarkin (Hon. mention), Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa (Duke University Press, 2020)
2021 Alex Blanchette, for Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (Duke University Press, 2020); Radhika Govindrajan (Hon. mention) Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (University of Chicago Press, 2018)
2020 Mythri Jegathesan Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Post-War Sri Lanka, (University of Washington Press 2019); Alondra Nelson (Hon. mention) The Social Life of DNA:Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome, Beacon Press
2019: Lilly Irani for Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press 2019); Juno Salazar Parreñas (Hon. mention) Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation
2018: Sara Ann Wylie, for Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds (Duke 2018)
2017: Sareeta Amrute, for Encoding Race, Encoding Class (Duke, 2016)
2016: Eben Kirksey for Emergent Ecologies (Duke, 2016)
2015: Gabriella Coleman for Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014)
2014: S. Lochlann Jain for Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (University of California Press, 2013)
2013: Heather Paxson for The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (University of California Press, 2012)
2012: Rene Almeling for Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (University of California Press, 2011)
2011: Alexander Edmonds for Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex and Plastic Surgery in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2010)
2010: Elly Teman for Birthing a Mother, The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self (University of California Press, 2010)
2009: Emily Martin, for Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton University Press, 2007)
2008: João Biehl, for Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival (Princeton University Press, 2007)
2007: Marcia Inhorn, for Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, religion and in vitro fertilization in Egypt (Routledge, 2003)
2006: Jan English-Lueck, for Cultures@SiliconValley (Stanford University Press, 2002)
2005: Joe Dumit, for Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton University Press, 2004)
2003: Cori Hayden, for When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2003)
2002: Lucy Suchman, for the body of her work
2001: Stefan Helmreich, for Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (University of California Press, 1998)
2000: David Hess, for the body of his work
1999: Rayna Rapp, for Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Impact of Amniocentesis in America (Routledge, 1999).