Distinguished Service Prize, Zeina Zaatari
We award the 2024 MES Distinguished Service prize to Zeina Zaatari, Director of the Arab American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago for her extraordinarily generous and visionary service to the field of Middle East Anthropology: her institution-building at a time of emergency, her teaching and training of scholars over many years including through workshop organizing and public events programming, her caring mentoring of students at UIC and beyond, and her brave and pathbreaking scholarship on multifaceted women’s activism in Southern Lebanon. She is a founding and leading member of the Arab Families Working Group. She is President-Elect of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS). Perhaps most importantly in this moment, she has built the ARABAMCC into an exemplary campus cultural center in the United States. Not only does it serve the needs of Arab and Muslim American students, but also it educates faculty, staff, students, and other local groups about the Middle East and its diasporas—a massive contribution that goes beyond the usual responsibilities of university cultural centers. It serves as a model for this urgent work for universities across the country. At a critical time for Arab American and Muslim students, Dr. Zaatari has been a life-changing mentor whose work addresses and embraces the tremendous diversity within our Arab and Muslim American communities. She is an “utterly committed” teacher, as one letter-writer remarked. In the last year, she has served as a kind of “first responder similar to COVID-19 medical first responders.” As another letter-writer said, “Zeina has worked non-stop to support our students and community, and to create a safe, welcoming, and comfortable place for Arabs, Muslims, and others to talk, process, and grieve.” We are proud to recognize Dr. Zaatari’s incredible work.
2024 MES Student Paper Award, Thayer Hastings
We award the MES student paper prize to Thayer Hastings for “The Inheritances of Non-Citizenship: Immobility and the Family in the Bir Ona Borderland.” Drawing from a broader doctoral project, Hastings investigates the entrenched issue of non-citizenship among Palestinian residents of Jerusalem. The chapter vividly traces how this precarious status of exclusion and disenfranchisement is inherited across generations, leaving Palestinian families in a perpetual quest for the “center of life” criteria imposed by governing Israeli authorities. Bringing together political and legal anthropology with historical analysis, Hasting’s ethnography is attentive to the nuanced dis