Congratulations to alums Thayer Hastings and Leen Alfatafta, whose papers were awarded the 2024 Middle East Section (MES) Paper Prize and Honorable Mention, respectively, by the American Anthropological Association. Congratulations to both on this outstanding achievement!
2024 MES Student Paper Award, Thayer Hastings
Thayer Hastings received the Student Paper Award for his work “The Inheritances of Non-Citizenship: Immobility and the Family in the Bir Ona Borderland.” Drawing from a broader doctoral project, Hastings investigates the entrenched issue of non-citizenship among Palestinian residents of Jerusalem. The chapter vividly traces how this precarious status of exclusion and disenfranchisement is inherited across generations, leaving Palestinian families in a perpetual quest for the “center of life” criteria imposed by governing Israeli authorities. Bringing together political and legal anthropology with historical analysis, Hasting’s ethnography is attentive to the nuanced distinctions of non-citizenship, highlighting the specific repercussions of ‘statuslessness’ of Palestinians for whom this lack of personal status constitutes an immanent and everyday condition of statelessness, restricting access to healthcare, education, employment, and freedom of movement. Arriving at a critical time when the lethal consequences of non-citizenship for Palestinians are in full display worldwide, Hastings advances our understanding of statelessness, particularly Palestinian statelessness, as a global phenomenon.
2024 MES Student Paper Award Honorable Mention, Leen Alfatafta
Leen Alfatafta received Honorable Mention for her paper “Motherly Affects: Coming Together with Iman Mersal’s How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts.” Alfatafta offers a well-crafted, theoretically sophisticated, and persuasively argued paper that examines the ways mothering/hood emerges as a “relationally dispossessive” practice in Iman Mersal’s How to Mend, challenging traditional binaries that limits prevailing understandings of what it means to be a mother. Informed by feminist studies, terrorism studies, and theories of embodiment and affect, Alfatafta reads Mersal’s work as an “archive of affect” deftly illustrating how the meaning of mothering/hood is not contained but is co-produced through the speculative, affective act of reading. While tracing this speculative exchange between the reader and the text, this paper also locates it within broader sociocultural histories and power structures such as capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. Ultimately, Alfatafta aims to shift the scholarly discussions from what mothering/hood is to what it might be(come).