The Ascendente Award is given in recognition of an early career scholar demonstrating outstanding early accomplishment in the scholarship, teaching, and engagement of/with the geography of Latin America.
Nominators noted, "Dr. Marston’s many contributions to geographic scholarship, and in particular, her impressive monograph Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia, published in 2024 by Duke University Press.
Just six years out from her PhD, Dr. Marston has published 16 articles, most appearing in top tier journals; a monograph, published by one of the most prominent presses in Latin American studies; four book chapters; and a variety of book reviews and reports. Her book is a major accomplishment that contributes to multiple geographical subfields and currents within Latin American studies. It offers a “material history” of mining cooperatives in Bolivia – a heretofore understudied topic – with the aim of assessing how these cooperatives acquired political power and their place within Bolivia’s political economy. The novelty of Dr. Marston’s analysis rests on its mixture of archival and ethnographic research (the latter of which included significant time spent underground with cooperative miners) and engagement with a broad sweep of intellectual traditions, from Bolivian Marxism to feminist science studies to postcolonialism. This book is sure to be major reference point for geographers of Latin America for years to come.
Dr. Marston is a stand-out contributor to the geographic study of Latin America, not only through her research, writing, and teaching, but through her public-facing service commitments. Marston served as Chair of the Latin America Specialty Group of the AAG for three years, and is the book series editor for the University of Florida Press Critical Geographies of Latin America and the Caribbean book series. In addition, she sits on the Executive Committee for the Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers, where she works."
Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia has been recognized by several awards: Latin American Studies Association Environment Section 2025 (winner), Latin American Studies Association Bryce Woods Award 2025 (honorable mention), Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers 2025 (honorable mention).
