2023 Suad Joseph Student Paper Award Winner

The Association of Middle East Anthropology is delighted to announce the results of the inaugural 2023 Suad Joseph Student Paper Award 

Recipient:

Honorable Mention:

Matthew DeMaio is the winner of the 2023 Suad Joseph Student Paper Award. DeMaio’s paper, titled “Accumulating Place: Multiplicities of Movements and Attachments among Palestinian Refugees from Syria,” is a powerful analysis and meditation on dwelling, movement, and the accumulation of (im)material things. Ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, the paper explores the legacy of accumulated displacement of Palestinian life. Centered on those displaced from Syria’s Yarmouk Palestinian camp, DeMaio discusses iterative displacement as a central aspect of Palestinian life, from the beginning of the Nakba, to 1967, to the 2011 outbreak of conflict in Syria. Palestinians who experience waves of displacement carry with them documents and passports, memories and languages: artifacts which both root them to Palestine and reveal life lived in other lands. With care and nuance, Matt’s theoretical contribution of accumulated attachments speaks to a central dilemma of Palestinian life: building an identity to place—to here and to there—in indefinite displacement. As Matt emphasizes, such a framework is not unique to Palestinians but defines mobile populations and those impacted by forced displacement all over the world.

The Honorable Mention goes to Kyle B. Craig for his paper “Colors of the Future: Street Art and Chromatic Politics in Amman, Jordan,” which offers a nuanced and theoretically robust analysis of the role of chromatic politics in the shaping of identity and prefiguring more inclusive futures. Craig’s paper examines beautification efforts undertaken by the Greater Amman Municipality in the downtown areas and the hills of East Amman beginning in the early 2000s, with its focus on monochromatic color schemes. He situates this within a political project of creating heterotopic, orderly, and uniform spaces for wealthy residents and tourists, arguing that the lack of color can serve as a form of anti-history that obscures diversity and socio-economic difference. He then interrogates local critiques of such monochromatic palettes and highlights calls for “authentic color,” thus demonstrating how color is a feature of identity construction. This goes hand in hand with his tracing of the emergence of street art in Amman and the way color has become wrapped up in ideas of boringness and excitement, which themselves index what he calls mono-chromotopias and poly-chromotopias. This dichotomy, he maintains, is metonymic of past/present, or present/future, chromotopias, in which the lack of color (the past/present) signals emptiness and hopelessness while color (the present/future) prefigures possibilities for more inclusive and just futures. Craig’s analysis is a critical contribution to the growing literature on the nexus of art and politics in the MENA region.