Roger Owen Book Award

Natasha Iskander

New York University

2023 Co-Winner

Natasha Iskander

Natasha Iskander

Does Skill Make Us Human? Migrant Workers in 21-st Century Qatar and Beyond. 

Princeton University Press

Natasha Iskander offers a wide-ranging and rigorous interrogation of the idea of skill. Through extensive research in both host and home countries and in superb writing, Iskander sketches a transnational ecology of labor, in which the concept of skill emerges as always already political. Rather than passing as a straightforward measure of ability, experience, education, or training, skill is revealed as a technology for organizing labor that structures social and political possibilities. A major achievement.

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