We are delighted to announce the two Early Career Scholar awards for the 2024 EASP FISS Joint Conference. Each winner will receive a cash award of HK$3,000 sponsored by Lingnan University, Hong Kong.

The winners are as follows. 

1. PhD Student Award

Tauchid Yuda is Yuda is pursuing his PhD at the Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He is currently an Assistant Professor (full-time) in Social Policy at the Department of Social Development and Welfare, UGM, Indonesia. He is also a former visiting Professor of Public Policy at the Department of Society and Health, Mahidol University, Thailand. 

Yuda’s article is part of his PhD research project that deals with healthcare policy development in response to the pandemic. Drawing on the theoretical perspective of policy entrepreneurs and policy learning, the author demonstrates the causal mechanisms of policy change triggered by important advocacy groups in critical junctures. Underpinning the findings is the process tracing method used by the author, collected government documents and conducted expert interviews to identify the major factors at play. Although the article draft may need some more elaboration to strengthen the argument, it offers fresh insight into understanding social policy development in Indonesia that bears theoretical implications for the EASP.

2. Early-Career Research Award

Yurie MOMOSE received her PhD from the University of Tokyo in 2023. She is currently a Research Associate at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo. This article is a re-elaboration of a previous publication from the author (Momose 2022b). Dr Momose assesses types of social exclusion using a latent class analysis that employs panel data. She further investigates whether the different types of social exclusion reflect different health outcomes for the respondents based on the JPLS dataset from the University of Tokyo. There is much to appreciate in this article, in that it looks like types of social exclusion for adults in Japan are quite defined and did not change considerably over time. This work is quite inductive and might need further refining in terms of conceptualisation, nevertheless, it presents a competently made analysis of data that is full of implications for social policies in Japan.

The Early Career Scholar Award winners