From UT News:
As every year, graduation prizes have been awarded during the Opening Academic Year. One master's student from each faculty received a certificate and a cheque for €1000 for the best master's thesis of the past year.
Faculty of BMS – Benjamin Jabold
Benjamin Jabold wrote two master's theses, both for his studies in Psychology and Philosophy. In his first master’s thesis in Psychology, he researched the social identities of radical right-wing populist voters across Europe to better explain why people vote for such parties. While previously, scholars consistently argued that anti-immigrant sentiments were the strongest predictor for radical right-wing populist party voting, his research demonstrated that there are subgroups of radical right-wing populist party voters characterized respectively by racism, protest voting, or racism and protest voting, or combinations of these with economic dissatisfaction. The results of his research are important because they enable us to better fight the rise of radical right-wing populism and fascism across Europe, by tailoring interventions to specific subgroups of voters.
In his second master’s thesis in Philosophy, he researched possible roles for communities in the sustainability transformations of cities. He demonstrated that so-called green growth cannot fulfil its own normative aspirations as economic growth in one region driven by so-called green technologies, such as e-vehicles, causes pollution, land conversion, and biodiversity loss in another region and harms the human development aspirations of the most vulnerable. He argued that degrowth, which is the equitable restructuring and downscaling of economic activity, is necessary and feasible if it builds on existing counterhegemonic praxes in cities and he thinks we should start implementing it in Enschede now.
