MESA Graduate Student Paper Prize
Alize Arīcan
University of Illinois at Chicago, Anthropology
2019 Winner
Alize Arīcan
Cultivating Potentialities: Inhabiting Urban Transformation in Tarlabaşı’s Contact Zones
It is an absolute pleasure to present this award on behalf of the MESA Graduate Student paper award committee. The committee's job was made particularly easy this year -- all three committee members ranked this year's winning paper as their top choice. "Cultivating Potentialities: Inhabiting Urban Transformation in Tarlabaşı’s Contact Zones" is based on impressive ethnographic research offers a theoretically sophisticated and compelling account of urban transformation in Istanbul. Alize Arīcan's careful attention to the everyday, using ethnography of the mundane to attend to scale and temporality, allows her to contribute a novel and nuanced understanding of experiences of dispossession. Her approach highlights what anthropology can bring to interdisciplinary fields like extraction or urban studies.
2019 Review Committee
Dina Bishara (chair), Cornell University
Mikiya Koyagi, University of Texas at Austin
Karen Rignall, University of Kentucky