Awards 2023
Submissions for the 2023 AGAPS awards are closed. This year's winner was announced at our annual Business meeting on Thursday, November 2 in Montreal, Canada.
The winners from last year can be found in our 2022 Awards Page.
2023 AGAPS Biennial Book Award Winner:
Dr. Amal Sachedina, Princeton University
Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern: The Politics of Time in the Sultanate of Oman
In this brilliantly researched book that deftly interweaves historical and anthropological approaches, Sachedina considers the role of heritage in Omani nation-building, and specifically the ways that the Omani Sultanate has used heritage as a technology to tame contested pasts and incorporate internal others into a secularized modern site of citizenship-production. However, she challenges ideas of heritage production as solely top-down, and moves away from an invented (repressive) vs. authentic (subaltern) dichotomy to explore how Omanis themselves engage material objects, memory, ethical practice, and temporality in ways that do not always fit the aim of official heritage projects, even as they also imagine themselves as modern national citizens. Her unique focus on residents of Nizwa, the former capital of the Ibadi imamate, which resisted the establishment of a sultanate aided by British colonial intervention; and of the sur al-Lawati enclave of South Asian descended merchant communities who have been incorporated into Sultanate discourses of multicultural secular national identity highlights multiple temporalities, subjectivities, and agencies. This engaging and sophisticated text significantly advances our understanding of Oman—relatively understudied in the Arabian Peninsula scholarship--and of the complex relationships between material culture, heritage discourses, time, and memory in the building of modern nation states and subjects in the Arabian Peninsula.
Honorable Mention:
Dr. Saba (Amélie) Le Renard, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Western Privilege:Work, Intimacy, and Postcolonial Hierarchies in Dubai
Le Renard’s book offers a fascinating insight into the lives of Western expats in Dubai, both white and nonwhite, in order to explore how “Western” is a powerful yet porous category in the United Arab Emirates, shaped by dynamics of race, gender, class, and sexuality. It is a category linked to colonial pasts, which continues to be integral to the reproduction of social stratification in the Gulf region. Through detailed ethnographic accounts of the professional and private lives of French expatriates in Dubai, the author sheds light on how Westerners—while not large in number compared to other immigrant groups—are integral to the reproduction of ethno-racial labor hierarchies, ideas of liberal vs. illiberal societies, the racialization of Emiratis and other groups, and the reproduction of heteronormativity. At the same time, they themselves are heterogenous and face raced and classed insecurities both in Dubai and in France. The book invites us to unpack received ideas about Western “expat” communities in terms of their internal cohesion, self-perception, and their interactions with the system they uphold and co-create. This book is a translation of a French publication, and as such it is also an excellent reminder of the immensely valuable scholarship on the Gulf that is produced in languages other than Arabic or English.
2023 AGAPS Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award Winner
Dr. Hee Eun Kwon, University of California, San Diego
Performance of Cosmopolitanism: Temporary Migrants and their Sense of Belonging in Dubai
The committee found Hee Eun Kwon's dissertation, which covers an under-studied segment of Korean migrant workers in Dubai and relied almost exclusively on extensive fieldwork, worthy of distinction. In a clearly written and sophisticated dissertation, the author impressively adjusted to limitations placed by fieldwork by the COVID-19 pandemic, using online interviews, newspapers, and an online weekly focus group to maintain connection with research subjects. In the words of one committee member, the dissertation "gives rich insights into life within a significant demographic in Dubai, raising original questions and developing insightful ways of responding to them. It also raises interesting questions about the political work done by official discourses of cosmopolitanism, to mask racialized, gendered and class hierarchies, attract labor migrants and construct a certain sense of belonging despite profound and insurmountable structural inequalities." In the words of another committee member, "this study helps us reconceptualize the spaces and faces of cosmopolitan encounters and reveals that there is still so much more to say and consider in the study of modern cosmopolitan experiences."
2023 Graduate Student Travel Award Winner
Fadi Kafeety, University of Houston
2023 Award Committee Members
Neha Vora, Jörg Matthias Determann, Fanar Haddad
Courtney Freer, Trinidad Rico, Mike Farquhar