SSA-funded DPhil student, Ben Scher, has been named a recipient of the University of Oxford’s Barnett Prize for ‘best paper’.
The Barnett Prize is awarded annually by the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (University of Oxford) for the best papers submitted by research students. This year, Ben Scher was recognised for his paper ‘Criminalization causes the stigma: perspectives from people who use drugs’, which was published in Contemporary Drug Problems.
Making the announcement on 5 July 2024, the department noted Ben’s “exceptional contributions to social policy and evidence-based social intervention and policy evaluation”.
Ben began his doctoral study in 2022, after spending time working in emergency shelters, overdose prevention centres, housing first, and outreach settings. His doctoral research involves evaluating harm reduction interventions across the UK, Canada, and Greece with the aim of establishing more effective and humane interventions to address the overdose epidemic.
The paper for which Ben won the award was part of the Canadian Drug Laws Project – a qualitative study conducted in British Columbia (Canada) between July and September 2020. This study was funded by the William and Ada Isabella Steel Fund and Small Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Grant through Simon Fraser University, and examined “how people who use drugs experience, perceive, and interpret Canadian drug laws, the structural manifestations of stigma and potential alternatives such as the decriminalization of illegal drugs”.
The opinions expressed in this post reflect the views of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the opinions or official positions of the SSA.
The SSA does not endorse or guarantee the accuracy of the information in external sources or links and accepts no responsibility or liability for any consequences arising from the use of such information.
