The 2014 APLA Graduate Student Paper Prize committee was Gabrielle Hosein, Mark Schuller, and Chika Watanabe. This year we added a mentoring component, with five finalists. We received a very high number of quality submissions. At 28, it’s much higher than recent memory.
Each paper had two committee members read the paper. The committee as a whole met on August 8 to select the finalists. The chair contacted each and invited them to participate in the meeting, and solicited suggestions for mentors. We divided amongst ourselves the responsibility to write our commentary for all five papers, and the chair solicited mentors from the list. The committee organized a discussion of these papers, with authors and mentors, during the AAA meetings.
The 2014 winner was Andrea Pia, A.E.Pia@lse.ac.uk, London School of Economics, for the paper “‘We follow reason, not the law’: Disavowing the Law in Rural China” – Annelise Riles, mentor
The finalists (and their mentors) were:
Veronique Fortin, University of California, Irvine vfortin@uci.edu, “Homeless People in Montreal: In and Out of Spaces of Non-existence” – Eve Darian-Smith, mentor
Georgina Ramsay, Newcastle University Georgina.Ramsay@newcastle.edu.au, “‘I am dead, now’: Forced Child Removal and Child Protection Interventions as Enduring Experiences of Refugee Objectification for Central African Refugees Resettled in Australia” – Didier Fassin, mentor
Guy Shalev, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill gshalev@unc.edu, “Doctors with Borders: Palestinian Physicians’ Testimonies in Israel/Palestine” – Ilana Feldman, mentor
Chris Upton, Indiana University jcupton@indiana.edu, “Guantanamo Bay, Anthropologists, and the State of Exception” – Daniel Goldstein, mentor
Graduate students, we look forward to your submissions for the 2015 competition!
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology 