Congratulations to alumna Lahoma Thomas who is among the recipients, and the sole Canadian, of the 2025 Early Career Researcher First Book Prize from Oxford University Press. The prize supports researchers who are preparing their first academic book and are within six years of their first academic appointment or PhD award.
Her book, Black Women and the Politics of Respect in Jamaica: ‘Seeing from Da Yaad’ examines political authority and legitimacy in Kingston’s inner-city communities (known as garrisons) through the perspectives of Black women. Drawing on ethnographic research, the book analyzes why some women support certain leaders of criminal organizations (known as dons), at times engaging in high-risk collective action on their behalf. It argues that such support is grounded in women’s assessments of political authority and legitimacy, shaped by everyday experiences of respect and recognition, rather than being explained solely by coercion or material incentives. The book situates these dynamics within histories of race, gender, and colonialism, and shows how political authority emerges through practices of respect and recognition that affirm people’s humanity, extending beyond conventional cost–benefit explanations.
The prize, in its inaugural year, received almost one hundred submissions, and the winning books went through a rigorous, three-stage review process. It was administered by a global committee of prestigious international scholars who were, according to the OUP webpage, charged with “looking for the most original work, especially work that blends disciplines and methodologies to create meaningful insights into complex societal problems.”
On what receiving this award means to her, Thomas said: "For me, so early in my career, the prize recognizes the book’s effort to take seriously how political authority, legitimacy, and resistance are lived and negotiated in contexts shaped by the afterlives of enslavement, the plantation, and racialized state violence. It affirms the book’s contribution to understanding Black political life not only through formal institutions, but through everyday practices, relationships, and forms of governance that often remain outside dominant analytic frames. At an early stage in my career, this kind of recognition is especially meaningful because it reflects confidence in the book’s intellectual direction and in the questions it brings to the study of political life.
Personally, I have familial ties to the Caribbean, and I have long understood the region as a critical and radical intellectual space. Scholars and activists from the region have developed influential bodies of theory that span postcolonial thought, Marxist and materialist critiques, critical race theory, and feminist scholarship, often emerging from struggles against colonial rule and racial capitalism. This work has shaped major theoretical movements and continues to inform contemporary social and political analysis. Yet the Caribbean itself is often absent from mainstream political science. When it does appear, it is frequently written about rather than from, with limited attention to the voices of those most affected by state power and the uneven, often violent dynamics of contemporary imperialism. This project is a refusal of narratives that reduce Black communities to sites of crime or disorder, and instead listens to how people themselves understand power, legitimacy, and survival."
The books endorsement reads that it 'is a highly original and illuminating ethnographic study which sets focus on the relationships between Black Jamaican women in marginalized communities and leaders of criminal organizations, a topic so far unexplored in scholarly literature. It is well written, theoretically sophisticated, and innovative, and shows how respect shapes governance, political legitimacy, and social order. It moreover situates these relationships within the trajectories of enslavement and colonialism that have historically subjugated women in these communities.'
Thomas is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University and received her Doctorate from the Department of Political Science in 2021.
The winning books will publish by 2027.