Congratulations to Gabriel Scheidecker, Nandita Chaudhary, Heidi Keller, Francesca Mezzenzana, and David F. Lancy!
It is our pleasure to announce that this team of international and interdisciplinary researchers have been awarded the ENPA Prize for a Remarkable Published Paper in Psychological Anthropology in 2023. Many thanks to Edda Willamowski from the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg for her nomination letter. The article, ‘”Poor brain development” in the global South? Challenging the science of early childhood Interventions’, published in ETHOS, is available here: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/etho.12379
The winner was selected by the Prize Committee who noted the following:
This article critically addresses the globalisation of Early Childhood Development (ECD) interventions, which aim to alter the “brain structure and functioning” of children. Policies agreed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2018 established a global plan to implement interventions across countries in the so-called Global South. The article deconstructs scientific claims made across a series of publications in the medical journal, The Lancet, that formed the basis and rationale for the WHO’s framework. The global ECD movement is led by supranational agencies such as UNICEF, the WHO, and the World Bank, and is supported by academic fields that may lack cultural awareness and methodological context. Scheidecker and colleagues call upon anthropologists, cultural psychologists, and others with relevant expertise to communicate the diversity and cultural complexity of the ethnographic record. Such knowledge is necessary against a universalisation of culturally narrow and historically recent configurations of childhood promoted in the name of international development. The practices associated with the ECD movement are parochialised in the article as weird in both senses of the term, the acronym, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Developed) and also weird as in creepy, and indeed scary, trying to alter the behaviour of families and brains of children across the world. While the spirit of the article is second nature to anthropologists, its manner is what is so impressive. The review is systematic, meticulous, and powerful. The analysis speaks across fields, using extensive ethnographic examples to forge meta-analyses. The authors explain why it is so relevant to highlight the different ways that people raise families and that children develop. The article will serve as a touchstone across disciplines and applied fields, with scope for a significant impact beyond academia. As an example of the wide reach of the paper, a published response from ENPA’s newly elected Co-Convenor, Carolina Remorini, has just been published, also in ETHOS. Through their impressive international collaboration, Scheidecker, Chaudhary, Keller, Mezzenzana, and Lancy illustrate the wisdom and vulnerability of the world’s culturally diverse ways of being that are misrecognised as deficient in the alarming paradigm of global Early Childhood Development. This article is a worthy winner of this year’s Prize for a Remarkable Published Paper in Psychological Anthropology.
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