| Year | Winner | Nominated For |
| 2024 | Mutale Tinamou Mazimba | Dr Mazimba, a postdoc at the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, used the Colin Murray Award to work on her project ‘Ubulungu (waist beads) and “Ba 2 Pin”: Changing norms and new livelihoods for urban families in Lusaka, 2010-2024’. Her project takes an interdisciplinary approach, using ethnographic methods to investigate questions about economic survival and cultural expression. The project seeks to address issues of gender and generation in a poor urban neighbourhood in Zambia, a kind of social environment that has received insufficient attention from scholars. |
| 2023 | Tara Weinberg | By studying collective land-holding schemes on farms in the former Transvaal province, Tara Weinberg’s research offers accounts of land buyers’ economic strategies, social bonds and changing philosophies of land ownership and law. They will use the Colin Murray Award to expand their research geographically from the former Transvaal into Free State and KwaZulu-Natal, to investigate the origins of land buyers’ ideas and practices. Dr Weinberg will look at archival records in those provinces, and conduct oral history interviews with the descendants of land buyers, sharecroppers, labour tenants and farmworkers. Their goal is to work with interviewees to locate family and personal archives that might help reconstruct a history of land purchasing. |
| 2022 | Nadia Ncube | Matabele narratives of ukukhula (‘growing up’) |
| 2021 | Kristina Pikovskaia | Lived Citizenship in Zimbabwe’s Urban Informal Sector during the Second Republic (2018–2021) |
| 2020 | Innocent Dande | Cooking, the crisis and cuisine: Household food economics and politics in Harare, 1997 – 2020 |
| 2020 | Francisco Miguel | The Waltz movement’: political activism of transgender people in Southern Mozambique |
| 2019 | Charles Dube | Dube will research the ways in which 3300 displaced families (forced to make way for construction of the Tokwe Mukosi dam in Masvingo, Zimbabwe) are responding to and managing discontinuities in interfamily social relationships in their daily lives. Dube is particularly interested in these families everyday experiences of belonging, sharing, and trust. Dube holds a PhD from the University of Stellenbosch and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Human Sciences Research Council Africa Institute in Pretoria, South Africa. |
| 2018 | Edmore Chitukutuku | Edmore completed his PhD in Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2017. His project is entitled ‘Conflict and its intimacy: political violence among neighbours in northern Zimbabwe.’ The project examines the causes, the organisation, the experiences and the legacies of the 2008 political violence in Bindura South. The project is particularly interested in the ways that ‘intimacy’ was implicated in the violence. It therefore examines how kinship and family relations were politicized and become the object of hate mobilisation. It also explores how families grappled with the legacies of the violence. The research will primarily be conducted in Northern Zimbabwe. |
| 2017 | Janne Juhana Rantala | Janne Rantala defended his thesis in September 2017 at the University of Eastern Finland. His research centered around urban popular memory in Mozambique, with a focus on rappers’ contributions to political remembering in the capital city of Maputo. Rantala’s postdoctoral research project, ‘Memory, Political Ancestors and Reconciliation’, will be based at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, with the Colin Murray grant supporting his new field work in Beira, central Mozambique. |
| 2016 | Chrisitanne Naaman | |
| 2015 | Joseph Mujere | |
Journal of Southern African Studies 