Evens Science Prize 2020

stakeholders, such as staff, students and partners. It also situates the researcher as not just an active participant in the research but a vital component of it.

Apart from exploring how to embed critical pedagogy that challenges Eurocentrism, they have been researching the extent to which critical thought and engagement with publics outside the university is possible in the context of neoliberalism.

Their work critiquing Eurocentric knowledge claims, on critical pedagogy, the student experience, and building a community component to teaching and knowledge production, is also applicable to contexts outside Black Studies.

Prof. Koen Leurs is an assistant professor in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

The participatory action research project ‘Media literacy through Making Media: A Key to Participation for Young Newcomers’ explored the question to what extent critical media literacy education can acknowledge and strengthen young migrants’ participation and resilience. The assumption was that promoting their media use as a critical practice may contribute to migrant youth’s participation, resilience and socio-cultural inclusion, on their own terms. As such, being critical is not the goal, but the means to an end. By making media, students learn to understand the workings of the media, necessary in order to be able to critically reflect on them.

Although they focused on media literacy education for young people who found themselves at a particular intersection of nationality, ethnicity and religion, the question of what migrant students can teach us about media literacy yielded important and broadly applicable insights about the potential impact of media literacy education on the lives of other vulnerable, disadvantaged and marginalised groups.

For both research projects, the jury stressed the importance of the empowering dimension both initiatives have. They both put the focus on individuals and communities taking charge of their representations and their voices. In doing so they also address the oftenexisting gap between academia and society.

The Evens Science Prize supports scientists by acknowledging their importance in exploring and finding out answers to the major challenges in our societies.

Since its establishment in 2007, the Evens Foundation has been focusing on Cognitive Neuroscience that furthers understanding of our behavior and mental state, whether individual or collective, with special emphasis on research that has ethical and societal impact.

Neuroscience encompasses the various scientific disciplines dealing with the structure, development and function of the nervous system, as well as the study of its chemistry and its impact on human behaviour. Cognitive Neuroscience applies an interdisciplinary perspective that involves fields as varied as mathematics, linguistics, computer science, psychology, philosophy of mind and anthropology.

This edition of the Evens Science Prize focused on scientific research with the potential to further the understanding of stress and resilience. Stress is a highly complex, multifaceted phenomenon, the study of which engages disciplines as varied as biology, neuroscience, affective neuroscience, psychology, the social sciences and neuro-ethics. Stress can be chronic or acute. It may concern individuals, families, organizations or entire social groups. Not only can the very same state of affairs (i.e. loud music) be experienced as enjoyable or as stressful but different individuals may also respond to it in very different ways – some exhibiting resilience in the face of traumatic situations, others developing long-term pathological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.