UniSA Associate Professor and CCS Faculty Fellow Brad West has been awarded the 2024 Stephen Crook Prize for the best authored monograph published within the discipline of Sociology in the previous two years.
This distinguished award from The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) went to his book Finding Gallipoli: Battlefield Remembrance and the Movement of Australian and Turkish History. The book is part of the Cultural Sociology Series by Palgrave MacMillan edited by Jeffrey Alexander, Philip Smith, David Inglis and Ron Eyerman.
Associate Professor West expressed his gratitude at the award ceremony as part of TASA’s annual conference in Perth last week. “I am deeply honoured to receive this prize, something that has been awarded in the past to many esteemed sociologists,” he said. He thanked those who supported the book and described the extensive journey of his work. “This book is the outcome of over 20 years of research, spanning not only a significant personal and professional journal of learning but also many trips to Türkiye,” he said. “The cross-cultural aspect of the book would not have been possible without the generosity of the Turkish people and colleagues who assisted with my research over many years.”
The focus of the book on how Australian and Turkish understanding of the Gallipoli campaign has been shaped by travel or exile from the battlefields has meant that it has not only been well received by fellow Australian sociologists, but by those across the humanities and social sciences.
Associate Director of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, Yagmur Karakaya, congratulated Associate Professor West. “Finding Gallipoli not only teaches the reader about the intricacies of this specific case, but also offers theoretical purchase on how transnational mobility and space relate to meaning-making,” she says. “I highly recommend this book not only to scholars and students of Turkey and Australia, but also to theorists of culture, mobility, nationalism, and tourism.”
University of Sydney historian Richard White said, “This remarkable book deservedly won the Stephen Crook memorial prize because it does so many things: analysing war - and the memory of war - through the illuminating lens of travel; re-thinking the nationalist meanings of Gallipoli by comparing Australian and Turkish responses; and exploring the social memory of war through commemoration, memorialisation and the development of rituals around remembrance, especially pilgrimage.”
Having previously been the recipient of TASA’s Best Paper Award, Associate Professor West is the only person to have won both of these major national prizes in sociology. He is now in the process of writing his next book, drawn from recent studies he has undertaken on the complex identity of Australian military personnel today and what it means to be a contemporary veteran.