Podgórecki Prize 2024: Julia Dahlvik (ex aequo)

The Podgórecki Prize 2024 was awarded to Julia Dahlvik and Edvaldo Moita. Here we publish the Prize Committee’s laudatio on Julia Dahlvik, as well as Julia’s acceptance statement.

Laudatio

Julia Rebecca Dahlvik has an extremely impressive CV which demonstrates her internationalism, indicated by visiting professor positions, a solid record of publications including six sole or first authored, and strong leadership in the socio-legal community. Her nominators highlight her mix of empirical work, use of a range of methods, and theory, and breadth of the themes, she deals with, describing her as having made ‘remarkable contributions to the socio-legal understanding of migration and asylum, and to the sociology of the administration of public institutions’.  We applauded Inside Asylum Bureaucracy’s methodological background and mix of various qualitative methods (participant observation, interviews, document analysis) and the diversity of theoretical frameworks on which it drew.  The resulting institutional ethnography, which deals with a highly relevant socio-legal issue, represents high level academic research, making a major contribution to socio-legal studies and underlining the centrality of social practice.

The 2024 Podgórecki Prize Committee: Hilary Sommerlad (chair), Balázs Fekete and Laura N. Lora

(Source: RCSL  Newsletter 2024 (2), p. 14)

Acceptance Statement by Julia Dahlvik

It is a great honor to be awarded the Podgórecki Prize 2024 for socio-legal research. I would like to express my gratitude to my nominators Barbara Bello (University of Tuscia) and Luigi Cominelli (University of Milan) for their valuable support; the exchange and collaboration with them has been very inspiring for me. I would also like to extend my thanks to this year’s Prize Committee: Hilary Sommerlad (University of Leeds), Laura Noemi Lora (University of Buenos Aires), and Fekete Balázs (Eötvös Loránd University) for their work and for their wonderful laudation, as well as the current RCSL president, Pierre Guibentif, for his support. The awarding of the prize came as a surprise to me during the business meeting of this year’s RCSL conference in Bangor (which was fantastic by the way).

Regarding my research on the asylum administration, I would like to mention that I actually found my home in sociology ‘accidentally’, initially taking sociology as elective classes to my original field in translation studies. In consequence, this led me to write my Masters Theses (in translation studies and sociology) on interpreting in the asylum procedure, and eventually to write my sociological PhD on the administration of asylum applications in Austria. I regard myself as an enthused qualitative researcher who loves being in the field, aiming to understand peoples’ practices and lifeworlds, and experimenting with methods and their combinations. I find it important to contribute to empirical and theoretical knowledge in the socio-legal field, while adopting multiple perspectives and thematic angles, trying to come close to reality’s complexity.

I would also like to mention that I attach great importance to the RCSL and all the work done by so many scholars from all parts of the world to institutionalize the exchange among scholars while allowing a broad identity, including sociologists of law, socio-legal scholars or law and society scholars, and to thereby strengthen the common representation of our work.

I believe that I felt drawn to the RCSL early in my career not only because of its huge potential for international exchange but also because law and society was not and still is not strongly established in Austria. This led me to be a co-founder of the Law and Society branch of the Austrian Sociological Association in 2016 and in the same year I had the honour and pleasure to act as RC12 local coordinator for the 3rd ISA Forum which was organized at my alma mater, the University of Vienna. I see becoming a member of the RCSL Board in 2023, an honoring moment, and founding a new Working Group (Digitalisation, AI and Society) together with Barbara Bello and Stefan Larsson (University of Lund) in 2024 as a solid foundation for continuing to contribute to the future development of the RCSL. Thanks to all the involved people for your trust, and thank you for awarding me this year’s Podgórecki Prize which is a very valuable recognition of my work in this field.

(Source: RCSL Newsletter 2024 (2), p. 15)


This page last updated 5 January 2025