Thirty University of Guelph students have won awards for writing papers about using anthropology to discuss ethical concerns.

The Community Action Project, created by the Center for a Public Anthropology invited students from across North America to write about research ethics and human subjects.

Under the project, the students grade each other’s papers, and the top five per cent receive awards.

More than 4,000 students participated in the project this year, including nearly 600 from U of G.

Prof. Tad McIlwraith, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, invited students to take part.

“Students get a chance to write for a public audience — an audience that is larger than just their professor or their teaching assistants — on a topic of relevance to our society,” he said.

“We all benefit from the research that social scientists conduct, and understanding the ethical challenges to such work is central to students’ training in fields like anthropology. Placing well in a competition like this offers students recognition beyond the classroom and shows that their work, even in big first-year classes, can be visible and have meaning more widely.”