Dear CASCA members,

The Labrecque-Lee Book Prize was established in 2018 and named in honour of two outstanding Canadian anthropologists. Marie-France Labrecque is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Université Laval, where she taught for more than 30 years. Since 1982, she has (co)authored and (co)edited nine books on gender, migration, and mobility in Mexico. In 2015, she was awarded the Weaver-Tremblay Prize by CASCA, recognizing her contributions to Canadian anthropology. Richard Borshay Lee is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Since 1965, he has participated as author, co-author, or co-editor of nine books on the hunter-gatherers of Africa and North America. In 2016, he was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

The Labrecque-Lee Book Prize honours a single- or co-authored monograph in sociocultural, archaeological, biocultural, ethnohistorical, or linguistic anthropology, in either French or English. It is awarded to CASCA members who demonstrate a Canadian affiliation through their fieldwork, institution, degree, or funding. The winner is honoured at the CASCA annual meeting and receives a $500 prize. This year, the selection committee was composed of Labrecque-Lee 2024 Book Prize winner Lindsay A. Bell, CASCA Francophone Member at Large Chantal White, CASCA Anglophone Member at Large Eve Haque, Emmanuelle Bouchard-Bastien, and Sarah Shulist. Four monographs were submitted, and the Committee’s criteria were richness and depth of ethnography, strength of theoretical work, literary style, originality, and contribution to anthropological debates.

The Committee is pleased to announce that the 2025 winner is Danya Fast, for her book The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver. Danya Fast is Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia and an associate member of UBC’s Department of Anthropology. Her research traces young people’s drug use, care, and institutional trajectories in the context of successive waves of public health emergency, including ongoing housing and overdose crises. Using applied and community-based participatory methods, she creates research in partnership with young people to drive change.

The Committee praised this monograph for its powerful and moving insight into the lives of young people navigating addiction, homelessness, and the dense network of interventions in Vancouver. Following them across shelters, treatment programs, city streets, and institutional spaces, the book reveals the complex reasons behind choices that may appear self-destructive from the outside, as well as the fraught relationships young people have with the rules and norms that govern access to care. Through careful, long-term engagement, Fast renders their hopes, fears, attachments, and everyday struggles with rare nuance and empathy. At the same time, the book compels readers to confront the urgency and tragedy of the ongoing public health emergency, offering an outstanding example of ethnography and creative non-fiction that will be of great value to scholars, students, and practitioners alike.

The Committee also wishes to award an honourable mention to Nicole S. Berry for her book Good Intentions in Global Health. Nicole S. Berry is a medical anthropologist and Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and completed postdoctoral training as a Kellogg Community Health Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Public Health. Her research examines how structural forces, power relations, and well-intentioned health interventions shape people’s everyday lives, often in ways that diverge from policy goals. She has conducted more than two decades of ethnographic research in Sololá, Guatemala, and is the author of Unsafe Motherhood: Mayan Maternal Mortality and Subjectivity in Post-War Guatemala. Her current research focuses on the long-term embodied experiences of people who have undergone hysterectomy in Canada, as well as collaborative arts- and land-based work that reframes understandings of the womb beyond biomedical frameworks, in partnership with Indigenous and epidemiological scholars.

The Committee noted that Good Intentions in Global Health offers a theoretically rich and carefully grounded account of the ethics that underpin participation in global health medical missions. Through detailed ethnographic portraits of volunteers, organizations, and host communities, the book illuminates the diverse moral logics, emotions, and aspirations that shape engagement in these projects, as well as the tensions that arise around responsibility, benefit, and impact. Committee members were especially impressed by the clarity of the argument, the depth of empirical research, and the way Berry mobilizes affect, reflexivity, and methodological openness to make a lasting contribution to debates in medical anthropology and global health.

The prize and honourable mention will be presented at the CASCA Annual General Meeting in May 2026.