Jonkman received the prize for his research on gold mining in Chocó, Colombia. Jonkman: "I am very happy with the prize. It is a great recognition of my research into gold mining in Chocó and of all the help I received from research participants in Chocó."
The J.C. Ruigrok Prize is a prestigious recognition from the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences and Humanities. The prize is intended for young researchers conducting original scientific research in the social sciences and amounts to EUR 12,500. The prize circulates among four research fields (legal sciences, economic sciences, humanities and social sciences). In 2022, the prize is intended to reward original social science research (by a researcher who obtained their PhD in 2017 or later).
Jesse Jonkman is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on natural resources, state formation, and citizenship, specifically in relation to Latin America. He received his PhD (cum laude) in 2021 with a dissertation that examined the socio-political organisation of small-scale gold mining in the Colombian region of Chocó. His dissertation previously won the dissertation award of the Faculty of Social Sciences. In 2021, he was awarded a Rubicon grant by the Dutch Research Council. Jonkman's Rubicon research takes place at both VU Amsterdam and the University of New Brunswick and focuses on the social and environmental consequences of large-scale mining in Colombia.