Polkinghorne Wins Clarivate Analytics Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship
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The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is delighted to announce that Ms. Sarah Polkinghorne is the 2018 recipient of the ASIS&T Clarivate Analytics Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship. The award’s purpose is to foster research in information science by encouraging and assisting doctoral students in the field with their dissertation research.
The Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship is sponsored by Clarivate Analytics. The scholarship was established in 1981 and is administered by the ASIS&T Education and Professional Advancement Committee.
Ms. Polkinghorne was selected as the winner from among a pool of outstanding candidates who were judged based on these criteria: potential significance of research to the field of information science; validity of methodology and proposed methods of analysis; originality and creativity, clarity and completeness of the proposal; presentation of a convincing plan for completion in a reasonable amount of time; and evidence of a continuing interest in scholarship, such as, a previous publication record.
In selecting Ms. Polkinghorne, the award jury provided the following citation: “The Clarivate Analytics Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship is awarded to Sarah Polkinghorne, doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Health, Arts and Design at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne (Australia). The proposed dissertation is titled: Food and information: embodied practices in everyday life. It seeks to understand how different people make sense of, use, or avoid food information during the process of feeding themselves, their families or friends. The dissertation takes a constructivist grounded theory approach, drawing a diverse interdisciplinary literature informed by phenomenology, embodied cognition, practice theory, and everyday life information seeking.
The candidate’s proposal was seen to be creative, breaking new ground in terms of its contribution to knowledge and methods, and seeking to apply sensory ethnography to everyday life information seeking questions. The methodology and approaches to data analysis were explicated in rich detail, with a clear understanding of theoretical sampling demonstrated, and its overall feasibility. The jury agreed that the proposal has the potential to contribute to the growing understanding in information science in areas such as embodied information practice and health and wellness information practices. The work is seen to have both theoretical and practical implications, both for information science and beyond (e.g., to policymakers and healthcare providers) in relation to health, wellbeing, and nutrition. The jury also considered that the proposal demonstrates an excellent understanding of an important direction in information practices research. The candidate brings a strong record of previous scholarship and publication which should contribute to the successful completion of the dissertation.”
Upon learning of her selection as the 2018 Clarivate Analytics Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship winner, Ms. Polkinghorne said, “Thank you to the members of the award jury and to ASIS&T for this honour. Your support will enable me to travel for data collection, and to share my findings widely, not just with academic colleagues but also with the communities where my participants live.”
Ms. Polkinghorne will accept her award at the 2018 meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) which will be held in Vancouver, Canada, November 10-14, 2018.