Our warmest congratulations to Zoheb Mashiur who was awarded the 2019 John MacGregor Prize and Brianna Hertford who was awarded the 2019 John Groom Prize.
Brianna and Zoheb both completed the MA International Migration programme, with Zoheb writing his MA dissertation on citizenship in Bangladesh and Brianna writing on the use of medical evidence in asylum appeals. Zoheb is now an Early Stage Researcher in the EU-funded MOVES programme, of which the University of Kent is one of five participating universities, and Brianna has taken a position as Program Manager at Human Rights Without Frontiers here in Brussels.
Dr. Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, Academic Director of Brussels School of International Studies said, “Brianna and Zoheb are reflective of the high calibre of students that we have here at BSIS, both in the Migration programme and in our other LLM and MA programmes.”
“My homeland of Bangladesh is a fairly young state (my parents are older) where the national memory is very much characterized by war trauma – for understandable reasons. My time at the Brussels School of International Studies gave me the emotional distance necessary to begin to sift through history and critically examine the highly charged discourse I grew up with, and which characterizes Bangladeshi politics to this day. I focused my dissertation on the so-called Bihari population of Bangladeshi, a group who arrived during the mass displacement of Partition, and who have since the Liberation War been branded in the national discourse as a pariah population, collectively marked by the Original Sin of having collaborated with the Pakistani state during the war. I attempted to examine just how the collaborator label arose, how it was operationalized by Bengalis as a justification for collective retribution, and how it still exists today in perpetuating a form of de facto statelessness for Bangladesh’s ‘Biharis’. It was a difficult topic both in terms of it scope and my own emotional connection with the events I described, and I hope that within these limitations my dissertation produced a discussion of some value.”
Of her dissertation, Brianna said, “My dissertation analysed the role and impact of medical evidence on asylum claims in the UK, especially regarding the mental health of asylum seekers. I found that testimony from medical experts was often misinterpreted or applied incorrectly by decision makers despite knowledge of trauma and the impact that has on individuals claiming asylum.”
Ambassador John Macgregor was Dean of the University of Kent’s Brussels centre from 2007 to 2009. On his departure he established a prize which is to be awarded, by the Brussels Board of Examiners, to the student with the best taught postgraduate performance on any programme at the Brussels School of International Studies.
Professor John Groom is the intellectual founder of the Brussels School of International Studies. In 2007 he established a prize which is to be awarded, by the Brussels Board of Examiners, to the student with the best taught postgraduate performance on a politics programme at the Brussels School of International Studies. If that student has been awarded the John Macgregor Prize, the award goes to the next best student.