Source: Daily Gleaner

What started as her project for the Royal Roads master's of professional communication program has led to Calgary native Nancy Black winning the top prize in the 2011 Dalton Camp Awards.

Beating out 107 other entries, Black's essay, Dismantling the Scarecrow: An Exploration into Calgary's Cultural Coming of Age, explores the role of social, political and media institutions in defining culture in Calgary.

She received $5,000 and a bronze cast medal by late Canadian sculptress Dora de Pedery-Hunt at a ceremony held at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery on Thursday night.

Black said the inspiration for her essay came from the knowledge of a distinct mentality in Calgary, one she hadn't seen elsewhere while travelling across Canada.

She didn't have a word to explain the mentality until she started learning about cosmopolitanism.

"Discovering cosmopolitanism sort of put a name to me discovering the issues I had been having with an undercurrent of a mentality in Calgary that didn't seem all that outward looking," Black said.

"So I married that to my other thoughts about Calgary that came out of the mayoral election to see if we could sort of harness cosmopolitanism and where we fit on the spectrum."

The initial essay took about a month to complete, but it's still growing as part her master's research project. She said finding out she won the contest came as a both a surprise and an honour.

"I believe Dalton Camp is actually the quintessential cosmopolitan man," she said.

"I've read about his positions on things, the very difficult decisions he made, choices that were unconventional and it just shows a real integrity that I think is lacking now in politics and in journalism.

"If you were going to conjure an award that would encompass everything I am and believe in, I couldn't come up with anything better."

Noreen Golfman, chairwoman of the steering committee of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, said Black's essay stood out because it did something different with a theme that can become repetitive.

"It really struck us as fresh, a really kind of intimate kind of look at what's going on there, but with all the great characteristics of detachment, like taking a step back and really looking at what's going on there from a perspective that few people have looked at before," she said.

Named for New Brunswick native Dalton Camp, a noted commentator on Canadian public affairs who died in 2002, the award ceremony travels across Canada with the Congress of Social Science and Humanities.

The contest, which invites people of all ages to submit an essay on the link between democracy and the media in Canada, launched in Fredericton at St. Thomas University in 2002.

However, Thursday's ceremony marked the first time the prize has been given out in the capital city.

Michael Camp, Dalton Camp's son and the director of the journalism department at STU, said although his father spent his career working in the private sector as a journalist, the contest is something he would have been proud to be associated with.

"The winners wrote magnificent essays about democracy and journalism, and that was something my dad cared deeply about, so he would be honoured to know that this award was named after him," he said. "I know that my father would have been delighted to know he's being remembered in this way."

© Daily Gleaner