The journal Flux awards a prize to early-career researchers who have published in its pages. This prize is open to early-career researchers who are currently undertaking a PhD or who defended their thesis no more than five years prior to the year of the award. The prize is awarded in the year following publication.
For 2026, the journal has decided, as a one-off, to award both a first prize and a second prize. The selection committee is made up of members of the journal’s editorial board. Assessment is based on criteria of scientific originality, quality of writing, engagement with fieldwork (in the broadest sense: case studies, archives, quantitative data sets, corpora of literary works, etc.), and the contribution to the journal. Articles based on doctoral theses will be particularly welcome, with a focus on empirical material (fieldwork, archives, and other sources).
Prizes
The prize for these articles, published in 2025, is worth 1,500 euros.
The 2026 First Prize has been awarded to Alix CHAPLAIN, who holds a PhD in Urban Studies from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) and is a contract lecturer and researcher at Sciences Po Saint-Germain-en-Laye, for her article entitled: ‘When infrastructure failures reshape political solidarity: Lebanese fragmentation through the lens of access to electricity’, published in issue 139–140 on Citizenship and Urban Infrastructure of the journal Flux.
This study explores how the crisis in Lebanon’s electricity grid – a symbol of the state’s failings – has turned access to electricity into a political and social issue. Faced with chronic power cuts, citizens are developing decentralised solutions, reshaping power relations and revealing the country’s sectarian, economic and territorial divisions. The article shows that the grid and its alternatives are becoming spaces for protest, domination or solidarity, offering a fresh analysis of the socio-material dynamics within a society in crisis.
The 2026 Second Prize has been awarded to Ali MOHSIN for an article published in English on the material anthropology of biometric citizenship infrastructures. He holds a PhD in anthropology and sociology from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (GIDS) in Geneva and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Global Partnership Network (GPN) at the University of Kassel in Germany. The article is entitled: ‘Infrastructures of excess: Politics of biometric and data-based citizenship in Pakistan’s cash transfer programme’.
This article examines the political subjectivities generated by digital social protection schemes, through a study of cash transfer programmes in Pakistan (BISP/EKP). By analysing these schemes as an infrastructure of inclusion, it reveals how they shape the experiences of female beneficiaries, caught between the formal reinforcement of their citizenship and practical disillusionment. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Lahore (2019–2022), the study shows that digital technologies, which are supposed to facilitate access to rights, are instead becoming an infrastructure of excess: labourious, time-consuming processes and profound contradictions in the relationship with the state. A critical analysis of the promises and limitations of digitalised social policies.
