MESA Graduate Student Paper Prize
Mona Khneisser
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Department of Sociology
2022 Co-Winner
Mona Khneisser
We are proud to announce “Cracks & Leaks of Water Infrastructure in Lebanon: The ‘Making & Unmaking’ of Hydrogeologies, Historical Subjectivities & Political Imaginaries” by Mona Khneisser as a co-winner of the 2022 MESA Graduate Student Paper Award. This paper frames the continued “failures” of dam development projects in Lebanon as part of a larger, historical cycle of capitalistic and post-colonial appropriation of hydrogeologies. The result is a sophisticated, and devastating, portrait of what these projects fail to achieve, whom they serve, and what (and who) they leave behind.