Given we were unable to present the Gertzel award in 2020 due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, we are awarding two bursaries of $10,000 for 2021.
Congratulations to Audrey Kalindi and Stephanie Roland, who are the recipients of the Cherry Gertzel Bursary Award (2021).
Audrey Kalindi is a PhD candidate in the School of Demography at the ANU. She holds a Master of Arts Degree in Population Studies and a Bachelor’s degree in Demography and Economics from the University of Zambia with a Post-graduate diploma in Monitoring and Evaluation from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is a former University of Michigan African Presidential Scholar (2017). Prior to commencing her PhD, Audrey worked as a Lecturer in the Department of Population studies at the University of Zambia and has done several research and evaluation activities in the areas of education, agriculture, maternal and child health, sexual and reproductive health and HIV/AIDS. She has a proven professional and education experience in quantitative and qualitative research, capacity development, and training and monitoring and evaluation of systems development and management, in both the public service and private sector, international development and donor sector. Audrey has worked on projects that are supported by the University of Zambia, UNFPA, CDC, UNICEF, USAID and Lund University among others. Her work has mainly been in Data Management, Field Coordination, Data quality training and mentorship, Community sensitisation and education, Monitoring and evaluation of programmes/ projects, and Evidence Informed Policy advocacy. She has professional membership with the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, Australian Evaluation Society, African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific and Zambia Monitoring and Evaluation Association (ZAMEA). Her current research interests focus on measuring the population-level maternal morbidity and mortality burden and how socioeconomic factors interact to bring about inequities in maternal health care utilisation and child health outcomes.
Stephanie Roland is a Namibian architect and urban designer who is currently working toward a PhD at RMIT University in Melbourne. Stephanie has worked across spatial disciplines in London, Cape Town, and Hong Kong. Her interests are people’s perception and behaviour in cities, especially how these are linked to notions of identity and belonging. Her research aims to develop new and participatory ways of engaging with and thinking about cities, with the aim of fostering decolonial ways of thinking about and imagining place.
Funds from the bursary will be used to travel to Windhoek, where her field research with young residents will focus on participative and visual approaches around ideas of home and identity, giving previously excluded voices agency in the making of the city. Colonialism and apartheid have left deep legacies in the way that Namibian cities are made and governed, and these restrictive and often inappropriate norms continue to be rigidly applied, to the detriment of the cities’ poorest inhabitants. Stephanie’s research is aimed at understanding residents’ everyday perceptions of place and identity in the city, to enable a new paradigm of an African capital city to emerge, rooted in a bottom-up understanding of the complexities of urban life in the global South. The research methodology contributes to the problem of engaging a layperson in talking about and thinking about space and place, especially when speaking in a second language.
The funds will also be used to circulate the practical implications of the research for urban design and city planning in Windhoek and other Namibian cities. The funds will also go towards disseminating the research at conferences and seminars at several German universities.
