2024 Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award Winner

Congratulations to this year's winners...

Winner: Scott Erich (CUNY Graduate Center)
Extraction, Property, and Rights in Southeastern Arabian Seascapes, c. 1820-Present

This dissertation offers readers an deeply engaging and original account of embodied practices of claims-making among fishermen of the Southeastern Arabian peninsula as they have practiced their trade within, alongside, and counter to the reach of imperial and state power. Relying on a creative and convincing combination of archival and ethnographic methods, Erich is able to highlight the interconnected nature of fishermens’ work and the efforts of diverse “regimes of property and rights” to sever those connections in the name of consolidating power. As Erich shows, both hegemonic systems and practices that refuse or confound them have and
will continue to shape the material environment of the Arabian seascape in lasting ways. The temporal, geographic, and conceptual scope of this expertly-wrought interdisciplinary project highlights the relevance of the Arabian peninsula to the study of law, history, anthropology, politics, and more.

Honorable Mention: Deina Rabie (University of Texas)
Linguistic Infrastructures: Language and Gendered Mobilities in an Imminent Post-Oil United Arab Emirates

This dissertation, the first in-depth study of English in the Gulf, offers an original contribution to the study of the region. It provides an important examination of state-sponsored feminism, while paying close attention to the ways Emirati women resist cooptation by the state. Rabie’s compelling ethnography is enriched not only through an extended period of fieldwork, but also
her years of prior work in the country as an English instructor. The fruits of this intimate personal engagement are apparent in how Rabie manages to tease out valuable ethnographic insights from her classroom exchanges. Finally, it is Rabie’s concept of “linguistic infrastructure” that will prove particularly vital for future scholars, insofar as it allows us to think about language as a
condition of possibility, and the ways in which the state intervenes to govern through language as a consequence.