The prize winner will receive $400 in travel reimbursements for the 2014 AAA meeting. The winner and four finalists will be invited to participate in special AAA Roundtable event.

The winner will be announced at the SAE Business Meeting.  The committee will evaluate originality, contribution to the field, and writing style appropriate for a manuscript in preparation for publication in an academic journal.

Chelsi West of University of Texas-Austin was awarded the 2014 SAE Paper Prize for her paper entitled, “The Anthropologist Takes the Stand: Thoughts on Race, Belonging, and Ethnography in Albania.” Vividly ethnographic and theoretically engaged, West’s paper captures how race is imagined in post-communist Albania by honing in on its underlying tensions and frictions in everyday encounters and in the media. The author transforms her appearance and charged interrogation on an Albanian television talk show into a vector for nuanced analysis of racialization and exclusion. West’s investigation yields a newfound appreciation for ethnographic methodologies, especially for how the researcher’s subject position in the field becomes a locus of inquiry and insight.

Student paper prize finalists:

Rachel Ceasar of University of California, Berkeley, “Te Molesta el Moro? Does the Moor Bother You? Berber Bodies, Moroccan Bones, Spanish Soil.”

Emanuel Moss of CUNY Graduate Center, “Fishing and Tourism on the Black Sea Coast: Leisure and Labor in the Post-Socialist Transition.”

Andris Saulītis of the New School University, “Performing Glasnost: The Letters to the Broadcast Labvakar, Latvija! 1988-1993.”

Jennifer Carlson of University of Texas-Austin, “Capacitating Women: Gender and Idioms of Flourishing
among Germany’s Renewable Energy Citizens.”

The reviewer committee included Noelle Molé Liston of New York University (Chair), Jana Rehak of Townson University, Jennifer Patico of Georgia State University,  and Kim Arkin of Boston University .