BFE Student Prize
Submissions are invited for the BFE Student Prize, awarded each year for the best individually led student presentation at the BFE Annual Conference. The initiative is designed to recognise the research and creativity of student members of our scholarly community. To be eligible for this year’s prize, you must be a presenter at the BFE Annual Conference at University of Cambridge (3-6 April 2025), and you must be a 2025 BFE member.
The BFE Executive Committee aims to include a range of presentation approaches for Student Prize submissions. Do not hesitate to contact us should you have questions about the guidelines or the presentation of your submission for the prize.
There are two possible formats. Format 1 is a traditional paper submission, which will suit presenters who deliver their research at the conference from a prepared script. Format 2 is a video submission, which may suit presenters who give more extemporised presentations, and/or deliver presentations that incorporate an element of performance, and so on.
You are welcome to submit your presentation in whichever format you believe best suits its content. The BFE-appointed prize panel will be instructed to evaluate submissions for the quality of the presentation rather than its style.
Format 1: Paper
Submit a paper as a PDF, Word or RTF attachment. It is also helpful to the prize panel if you include all illustrative materials used in your conference delivery, such as PPT slides and/or sound or video examples. It is your responsibility to ensure that all submitted files have been received and that they will be easily accessible to the members of the judging panel. To this end, we recommend common formats such as MP3 and MP4, and that you avoid email attachments for large files. Please use a file-sharing service or a YouTube link (an unlisted link is fine) to transmit large audio or video files.
The submission should closely resemble what you presented at the conference. The text of the paper should be as close as possible to what you said during your 20-minute time slot, although you are welcome to include a reference list. If you played extracts from the audio or video clips you submit, you should specify these by means of time codes, e.g., [Here I played 00:00 to 01:20 of Audio Example 2].
Format 2: Video recording
Submit a video recording of your live conference presentation, omitting the Q&A. The video should be in a common format such as MP4. You can also submit your illustrative materials such as PPT slides, sound (MP3s) and audio-visual files (MP4) if these were important to your presentation and are not clear in the video. (If you played extracts from the audio or video clips you submit, you should specify the portions you played with time codes.)
It is your responsibility to ensure that all submitted files have been received and that they will be easily accessible to the members of the judging panel. To this end, we recommend common formats such as MP3 and MP4, and that you avoid email attachments for large files. Please use a file-sharing service or a YouTube link (an unlisted link is fine) to transmit large audio or video files. The submission of a written paper and/or reference list (in Word, RTF, or PDF format) as accompanying material is optional.
The prize panel will assess video submissions for their content rather than their technical quality, although the picture and sound should be clear. This allows for submissions made on a device such as a smartphone.
Should you experience technical problems or other challenges at the conference, we can accept video recordings of your presentation made after the event and before the submission deadline. Post-recorded presentations should be labelled as such and must be as close to the conference presentation as possible without revision.
This prize is not awarded for contributions to roundtables or workshops or for presentations in poster or film format. Other innovative presentations may be accepted, however, subject to the agreement of the prize panel Chair.
Submissions should be emailed to Amanda Villepastour (VillepastourAV
Cardiff.ac.uk). The deadline is noon on Monday 21st April 2025. Prize winners may be encouraged to develop submissions into publications or podcasts.
2024 Competition
Following the BFE Annual Conference at University College Cork, April 2024, the BFE Student Prize panel awarded the student prize to Rose Campion and Sheyda Ghavami’s - ‘Whose Knowledge, Whose Production?: Experiences from Co-produced Research on Kurdish Singers in Europe’, with an honourable mention for Jim Hickson’s ‘Micro-Organology of a One-String Fiddle’.
Campion and Ghavami
This was a challenging and provocative paper on co-produced research that speaks to current attempts to decolonise ethnomusicology. The paper engages well with relevant scholarship and issues in ethnographic methods. The panel was particularly impressed by the creative presentation style and how it reified the complicated power dynamics between researcher and the researched.
Hickson
A stylishly written paper about a one-string fiddle that starts in the Pitt Rivers Museum, then takes the reader on a fascinating and tangled journey that crisscrosses colonial Africa and Europe. The panel was impressed by the paper’s wide-ranging source material and its interdisciplinary focus, combining instrument history and museum studies.
Many thanks to our prize panel: Lyndsey Copeland, Áine Ryan Mangaoang and Stephen Millar (chair)