The journal Flux awards a prize to young researchers who have published in its columns. This prize is intended for young researchers who are currently working on their thesis or who defended their thesis no more than five years prior to the year of the award. The prize is awarded the year after publication.
For 2024, this means an article published in 2023. The selection committee is composed of members of the journal's editorial board. The evaluation is based on criteria of scientific originality, quality of writing, commitment to the field (in the broad sense: case studies, archives, quantitative data corpus, literary corpus, etc.), and contribution to the journal. Articles based on theses will be particularly appreciated, with attention paid to empirical material (fieldwork, archives, and others).
The prize is worth €1,500.
The 2024 prize is awarded to Étienne Dufour, holder of a thesis in regional planning prepared at the Laboratoire Géographie-Cités (UMR 8504) under the supervision of Sabine Barles and defended on May 21, 2024, for his article entitled: "Between renewal and fire: the forgotten stage of industrial composting, the abandoned middle ground of household waste treatment (Île-de-France, 1940s–1990s)" published in issue 131 (New perspectives on the history of off-grid technologies) in 2023 of the journal Flux.
The article is a contribution to the historiography of urban organic waste treatment. The research, which is based on the use of administrative archives (particularly those of the Ponts-et-Chaussées) and specialized journals in the fields of agriculture, hygiene, and urban engineering, focuses on alternative and "off-grid" agricultural recycling techniques in the Paris region between the 1940s and the 1990s. This research thus contributes to an "alternative" environmental history, before the "all-network system destined all waste for destruction and dispersion in incineration plants or burial in landfills."