With pleasure, we announce that Catherine Carstairs’ article, “The Environmental Critique of Water Fluoridation,” published in Volume 38, Number 1 (2015) of Scientia Canadensis has been awarded the Jarrell Prize for best article published between 2015 and 2017. The Jarrell Prize was created in honour of Dr. Richard Jarrell — a founding member of the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association, and the journal’s first editor — who passed away in 2013. The Prize comes with an award of $500.
The nominating committee wrote this assessment:
This is a model of how to write an essay for Scientia. It focuses on a science issue in Canada, noting key details and peculiarities, but without forcing a reading qua a distinctively Canadian situation. The author’s footnotes are fulsome and generous, provoking and enabling follow-up scholarship from readers. The prose style incorporates an authorial voice that remains persuasive without ever cajoling. The author connects global issues and local narratives without straining. We especially liked how Carstairs linked a decidedly local story about STOP to a broad shift where both scientists and activists moved away from the individual body to the ambient environment as the locus of study. Finally, in addition to the narrative, the paper clarifies the issue of fluoridation as a historical question, where understanding what’s at stake requires following differential chronologies. This is a paper we would return to both to see how it’s crafted and to see whether the method could be fruitfully used to study other issues
Congratulations Dr. Carstairs!