2022 BRISMES Conference Student Paper Prize Winner Announced

We are delighted to announce that Hannah Owens has been selected as the winner of the 2022 BRISMES Conference Student Paper Prize with Faiq Mari receiving Honourable Mention. The BRISMES Conference Student Paper Prize was established in 2021 to support BRISMES student members in the development of peer-reviewed work. The winner receives £300 and is mentored through a review process at the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (BJMES) by a senior member of the BRISMES academic community.

Congratulations to Hannah and Faiq, and thank you to everyone who submitted their paper for consideration.

2022 Winner: Hannah Owens

Channelling (in)security: Governing movement and ordinary life in ‘imagined’ geographies

Hannah Owens’ paper, Channelling (in)security: Governing movement and ordinary life in ‘imagined’ geographies, explores human mobility and security in the Mafraq Governorate (Jordan), interrogating the meaning of space in Amman, Zaatari village, and the road between the two. The paper contributes to critical and vernacular security studies, exploring rural people’s memories and accounts of the encounter with the state apparatus and its security infrastructures. Weaving ethnographic observations, fieldnotes and theoretical references, Owens offers a dense ethnographic engagement with the hierarchies that govern racialised and gendered bodies, and their differential ability to move and navigate space and territory.

2022 Honourable Mention: Faiq Mari

Between Romanticization and the Market: Youth Agricultural Cooperatives in the West Bank

In his paper Between Romanticization and the Market: Youth Agricultural Cooperatives in the West Bank, Faiq Mari explores practices of collective agricultural resistance put in place by politically alienated left-wing activists in the context of colonial proletarisation and marginalisation produced by Israel’s settler colonial apartheid. Mari convincingly argues that these experiments from below provide ideologically motivated young activists with an opportunity for political maturation through collective mobilisation and the creation of new economic relationships which allow them to resist the current challenges the Palestinian project of self-determination and liberation is facing. This promising paper, which can certainly turn into an important and innovative publication, is well written and supported by interviews with the activists and an excellent analysis of existing materials.